PR 

4 73 



APPRAISEMENTS 

AND ASPERITIES 

JS TO SOME CONTEMPORARY WRITERS 
FELIX E. SCHELLING, Ph.D., LL.D. 




Class _PJ<4liy 
Book ' >Sa- 
CoByiiglitli? 

CQFUUGHT DEPOSIT. 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 



APPRAISEMENTS AND 
ASPERITIES 

AS TO SOME CONTEMPORARY WRITERS 

BY .."^'^ 

FELIX E. SCHELLING 

!• 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 




PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON 
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 

1922 



COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 



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PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPPNCOTT COMPANY 

AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS 

PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A. 



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The following articles first appeared 
in the columns of The Evening Public 
Ledger of Philadelphia to the proprie- 
tors of which I am indebted for per- 
mission to reprint them. Of the two 
chief words constituting the title, the 
first is far the more important; for it 
is better humbly to ascertain what a 
book is than to fall into asperities 
about it. Every review is an expres- 
sion of opinion: that this opinion be 
honestly arrived at, is all that we can 
demand. Our range here is over the 
fields of poetry, fiction, the essay and 
the drama, with single excursions into 
biography, anthropology, philosophy 
and education. Where each subject 
stands by itself, classification is im- 
possible. The order therefore is more 
or less haphazard. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

The Familiar Essay 9 

" Personal Prejudices" 15 

Our Miss Repplier 21 

One of the Three Graces 27 

The Quaintness of Mr. Crothers 33 

The Terrible Mr. Coloring 39 

The Man of the Happy Mean 45 

"The Art of Biography" 50 

"Potterism" 56 

Joseph Conrad on Life and Letters 62 

Theophrastus in Kansas 67 

Carl Sandburg — Rebel? 73 

Alfred Noyes and a Great Poetic Tradition 79 

John Masefiei.d and the Key Poetic 85 

An Old Myth Revitalized 91 

The Poetry of George E. Woodberky 96 

As TO American Drama loi 

Mr. Drinkwater's "Mary Stuart" 108 

New Music on the Eternal Triangle 114 

"The Greatest Play since Shakespeare" 120 

Guitry's "Deburau" 126 

A Trenchant Satire on the War 131 

No Improvement on Victor Hugo 138 

"The Emperor Jones" 144 

The Stage from Betterton to Irving 150 

Another Volume of "Sherburne Essays" 157 

A Sound British Critic 163 

Some Forgotten Tales of Henry James 169 

The Veritable Queen of English Fiction 175 

The New Stone Age 181 

A Breath of Fresh Air on Education 187 

Professor Santa yanna on American Opinion 193 



APPRAISEMENTS AND 
ASPERITIES 

THE FAMILIAR ESSAY 

" T HAVE read with delight the advance sheets 
X of 'Adventures and Enthusiasms, ' by E. V. 
Lucas. " So wrote A. Edward Newton to a num- 
ber of his friends before his recent departure to 
London, Johnson hunting — Dr. Samuel, dear 
reader, immersed in contemporary politics, not 
Hiram — and Mr. Newton added: "It is one of 
the most charming volumes of essays I have 
read in a long time." Even those of us who 
have a less perfect discernment for these delicate 
niceties of style and sentiment must appreciate 
the justice of this verdict of the pundit and add 
our less authoritative praise when Mr. Lucas has 
once made us his; and some of us have been such 
long since, from the time of our reading in his 
edition of the "Works and Letters of Charles 
and Mary Lamb, " and from other pleasing vol- 
umes of his essays and collections in which good 
taste combines with scholarly judgment to bid 
the reader to the feast. 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

It is said that publishers shy at the word 
"essay;" but then pubHshers are a skittish tribe 
and shy easily. Certainly many a title tries to 
conceal or evade that dangerous word. I notice 
that Mr. Crothers' new volume is to be called 
"The Dame's School Experience and Other 
Sketches," this last word borrowed from the 
artists. Another evasion is "papers," abstracted 
from the lawyers. Indeed, this question of 
"What's in a name.^"' is not unimportant in be- 
guiling the would-be reader and purchaser. Nor 
is he altogether wrong as to "essay," that 
sometime modest and deferential word, in which 
the humble writer asks you to receive these, his 
efforts, his attempts, not expecting too much. 
But this significance has long since evaporated 
into thin air, and an essay conveys to the un- 
initiated — and to the initiated now as well — the 
sense of a something dry, solid, lengthy and not 
to be trifled with. Mr. Lucas is happy in his 
title. We have all of us had adventures and un- 
fortunate is he who has outlived his enthusiasms. 

The essay is a delicacy for the aristocrat, the 
Brahmin among readers. Children and those in 
whom childhood is prolonged read for the story; 
and the "preternaturally good" read for edi- 
fication, which, for the most part, they are sadly 
in need of. Practical people read for facts, al- 
though they may never arrive at a point at which 

10 



THE FAMILIAR ESSAY 

they actually recognize a fact when they meet 
one. And the romantic read impossible fiction 
or aureate poetry and lose themselves in un- 
reality. I repeat that he who loves the essay — 
especially the familiar essay, as it Is called — and 
letters, Is the aristocrat, the Brahmin among 
readers, because he, above all others, has the 
taste of the connoisseur for delicate flavor, for 
fragrance, for aroma, that spirit which gives to 
our best essays a quality above the posturlngs of 
dramatists and novelists and the flutterlngs of 
poets, be they free or caged In verse. 

After a reading of Mr. Lucas's "Adventures 
and Enthusiasms" I asked myself: What Is 
there In these little chats on subjects (many of 
them, stern moralist, really trivial) that gives 
me, the reader, such an unalloyed pleasure.^ I 
cannot say that I have learned very much — 
something about the Man of Ross and Leach, 
the Illustrator of Punch; the possible origin of 
that marine successor to old Father Neptune, 
Davy Jones and his renowned locker; the cir- 
cumstance that the nautical descendants of Sir 
Francis Drake are still playing at bowls on the 
identical bowling green back of the Hoe at Ply- 
mouth (England, of course, we have no Hoes), 
on which Sir Francis was surprised while at 
his game with the news of the coming of the 
Spanish Armada. These are some of the curious 

II 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

bits of information that remain, together with a 
few stories, not always quite so good as admir- 
ably well told. Even a recurrence to the list of 
contents, with my reading fresh in mind, does 
not seem much to help. "The Sparrows' 
Friend", "A Morning Call", "The Perfect 
Guest", "A Devonshire Inn" and the agreeable 
London rambles to Greenwich, Windsor, the 
Zoological Gardens, Kew, places to which we all 
go when in London: well, now, what is it that he 
has just been saying so agreeably about these 
old haunts of yours and mine? And that un- 
tenacious memory of the modern reader gives me 
no very definite answer. What it does give me 
is the general recollection of a very pleasant 
hour or two in exceedingly good company, and 
that, I cannot but think, is the fulfilment of the 
very beau ideal of the familiar essay. 

It is always interesting, however at times 
disappointing, to meet the people whose books 
one has read. What would not some of us, who 
still harbor enthusiasms, as does Mr. Lucas, 
give to have met — not Dr. Johnson, he was not 
meetable, you went to him as to a sovereign 
loftily enthroned. No, decidedly not Dr. John- 
son, nor the great Mr. Burke; but Oliver Gold- 
smith, in his peach-colored plush suit — old Noll 
was no beauty — or Dick Steele, when his cups 
had made him maudlin, and he was penning a 

12 



THE FAMILIAR ESSAY 

letter to "his dearest Prue, " to deprecate a 
caudle lecture. What it would have been to 
have sat quietly in a corner when Coleridge 
asked Lamb, "Charles, have you ever heard me 
preach"? And Charles stuttering reply, "Sam- 
Sam-u-u-el, I have never heard you do any- 
thing else." 

The familiar essay makes one familiar. Not 
many months ago I had the pleasure of meeting 
Mr. Lucas and sitting beside him for a while. I 
can testify to the truth of his statement that he 
is a very good listener; for that day he listened to 
many of us, but repaid the multiplicity of our 
converse in the quality of his minor part in the 
conversation. I find that I cannot remember a 
single one of his many happy remarks, much less 
record the color of his eyes or, if he will pardon 
me the liberty, the plenty or paucity of his hair. 
I might guess at his age. His dress made no 
impression upon me. He was inconspicuously 
the gentleman, the polite man of the world, and 
I would recognize him in a minute should I be so 
happy as again to meet him. What I took away 
with me was the recollection of a very pleasant 
hour in exceedingly good company. The man 
here tallies precisely with his work. 

Now this, it seems to me, is exactly the se- 
cret of the familiar essay and the reason why it is 
beloved of the aristocrat in reading, the Brah- 

13 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

min aforesaid. Personality counts big no matter 
in what walk in life; but mere personality is not 
enough in the familiar essay. Somebody said 
something once about the Johnsonian manner to 
the effect that were Dr. Johnson to cause min- 
nows to speak he would give them the utterance 
of whales or leviathans. A familiar essay is not 
an authoritative discourse, emphasizing the in- 
feriority of the reader; and neither the learned, 
the superior, the clever nor overwitty, is the 
man who can "pull it off." An exhibition of 
pyrotechnics is all very fine; but a chat by a 
wood fire with a friend who can listen, as well as 
talk, who can even sit with you by the hour in 
congenial silence — this is better. When, there- 
fore, we find a writer who chats with us familiarly 
about the little things that in the aggregate go to 
make up our experience in life, when he talks with 
you, not to show off, not to set you right, not to 
argue, above all not to preach, but to share his 
thoughts and sentiments, to laugh with you, 
moralize a bit with you, though not too much, 
take out of his pocket, so to speak, a curious 
little anecdote, or run across an odd little exper- 
ience and share it pleasantly, enjoying it un- 
affectedly and anxious to have you enjoy it, too 
— when we have all this, we have the daintiest, 
the purest and the most delightful of all the 
forms of literature — the familiar essay. 

H 



" PERSONAL PREJUDICES " 

PERSONAL PREJUDICES." Could there 
be a more perfect, a more fitting title for 
a book of essays? Why, it is as obvious and as 
admirable as Columbus' immortal solution of 
the first step to the making of an omelet; for the 
essay is nothing if it is not personal, and what is 
so personal as prejudice? This is another glar- 
ing example of that prevalent impertinence, a 
tendency on the part of everybody to say our 
good things before we have had a chance to cere- 
brate them. And in this case it is not a mere 
man — one might stand that — but a lady, and 
from Boston. The sex is becoming more and 
more addicted to this disconcerting practice, 
and this title is far from the only instance of this 
sort of thing in this book. Much has been said 
in proverb and in fiction about woman as bound 
to have the last word. One could put up with 
that, but it is going a bit far likewise thus to 
insist on having the first word as well. 

For example here is a humble reviewer who 
has been saying for years: "I never meet an 
Englishman to whom I take a particular fancy 
but what he turns out to be a Scotchman or an 
Irishman." And here comes along a lady from 
Boston who tells my story in this superior way. 
"An Englishman is never more soul-satisfying 

IS 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

than when he is a Scotchman. " Notice how the 
subject is simpHfied by leaving out the Irishman. 
(EngHsh statesmen and New York poHticians 
take notice.) Long residence in an Irish city 
like Boston would naturally suggest this. And 
then the essayist goes on blithely to praise 
Scottish tact and discretion, the like of which, 
she tells us, she has never met "outside 
of a petticoat," finding in the Scotchman's 
hereditary right to this article of apparel "an 
abbreviated excuse" for these virtues. It 
looks easy to do, but try it. 

By her own avowal in a previous volume 
Mrs. Sturgis is very entertainingly a grand- 
mother; it needed not the author's name nor 
such an avowal to disclose her sex. Femininity 
is written on every page of "Personal Preju- 
dices"; or is it that personal prejudices are 
written on every page of femininity ? But " from 
Boston, in Boston," rather troubles me. Mrs. 
Sturgis lives on Beacon street. To live on 
Beacon street is not exactly to hide one's light 
under a bushel. Many true Bostonians live and 
have lived on Beacon street, but does the verit- 
able Bostonian tell you so.f" Boston deals not 
in works of supererogation. Still again, Mrs. 
Sturgis alludes more than once to her darling 
Herald. Transcript is Bostonese for the news- 
paper. Save Mohammed, there is no other 

i6 



"PERSONAL PREJUDICES" 

prophet. And a Sunday edition of any news- 
paper so littering the house that an orderly ma- 
tron can never get the leisure to go to church! 
Does Boston refer to a Sunday paper or to ab- 
stinence from church-going, whatever actual 
practices may be? I am even more worried In 
this matter of Bostonlan authenticity by an 
avowed dislike for gardens — not the dislike, but 
the avowal, by Mrs. Sturgis' unabashed con- 
fession that she does not say "tray" for "trait" 
— let Bryn Mawr note — and by the extraordi- 
nary circumstance that she alludes, even to a 
mere Bolshevist, as "my gentleman friend," 
an un-New England plethora of words where 
either "gentleman" or "friend" might serve, 
each being equally ironic. 

However there are some characteristics of 
"Personal Prejudices" which, I confess, are dead 
against this agnosticism of mine. There is a 
charming assumption, referable to atmospheric 
conditions in Boston, to the effect that any trifle 
well talked about may make interesting conver- 
sation; and this assumption is abundantly 
proved In this book in the pleasing process. 
There Is, once more, a perfect complalsancy as 
to the superiority of Inhabitants of Boston,even 
as to the conduct of policemen — whose miscon- 
duct has made a Vice President for the United 
States — and a total oblivion as to whether the 

17 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

reader might be interested in these parochial 
matters. And there are straws — like the spell- 
ing of "labour" with all the letters to which it 
can possibly be entitled, even in England — to 
indicate that meticulous nicety in spelling and 
pronunciation which no American affects a day 
to the south or west of Beacon Hill. The un- 
fortunate foreign "gentleman friend" of so- 
cialistic leanings, for example, is rallied on his 
phonetic spelling of "does"; it is only the elect — 
and who knows not where abide the elect — who 
contrive to manipulate the theta and the sigma 
in this necessary word in such a wise as to de- 
lude themselves into the belief that they are 
pronouncing both of them. 

But our shaft is shot and if it seem barbed, be 
it remembered that the only way to meet pre- 
judice is with prejudice. Moreover, Mrs. 
Sturgis has a way with her prejudices which 
makes you wish that you might share them, and 
she has sensible reasons for many of them which 
are convincing to such as like to be wittily con- 
vinced. "For a woman to vote is for her to 
commit a sin." This should be a terrible deter- 
rent to such of the sex as may be treading care- 
lessly to the polls. But Mrs. Sturgis told us this 
less because of her conviction that voting adds 
an eighth cardinal sin to the menaces of feminine 
frailty than to create a pleasant dilemma in 



"PERSONAL PREJUDICES" 

which not to obey the constitution and vote, if 
you are a woman, becomes likewise a sin. Where- 
fore: "I have no objection to picking up the 
loose ends and polishing up a man's job when he 
has done his share, but with all the other things 
I have to do, I can see no reason why I should do 
his work as well as mine": a point well taken. 
Mrs. Sturgis has much to say which is sensible 
as well as clever about servants, on which topic 
the prudent man will hold his peace — and suffer. 
A certain remark of Mrs. Sturgis about Japanese 
servants should be repeated not on the Pacific 
coast, lest it lead to strained relations in the East. 
On house and home, on quality and equality and 
on differences and distinctions there are convic- 
tions and truths, as well as buttresses of precon- 
ception. Mrs. Sturgis' opinions on experts, 
building laws, ventilation, positive versus neg- 
ative precept, hospitals and "democracy "should 
take other women to the polls to make her mayor 
of an even more perfect Boston than Boston is. 
"There have been class distinctions ever since 
Eve spanked Cain for unbrotherly action to- 
ward Abel" is the statement of no new truth; 
but it is a picturesque way of putting it, and 
deeply will many share Mrs. Sturgis' indigna- 
tion as to the exclusion of such as labor with 
such brains as they have from that rising upper 
aristocracy, "the working classes." 

19 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

In Mrs. Sturgis' search for a book which we 
are prevlleged to share she turns up many an old 
friend. Rollo, confounded little prig; Henry 
Kingsley, eclipsed by a more successful brother. 
"The Heir of Redclyffe"; among moderns, Mr. 
Archibald Marshall, who, as we knew him de- 
lightfully years ago, before fame claimed him, it 
is pleasant to hear once more approved. Mrs. 
Sturgis passes by De Morgan and Mr. Hewlett 
with a cold bow; one of them bores her — "Mr. 
Hewlett moves in quite different circles." 
When she reaches Mr. Shaw we have only: "I 
wasted no time over that gentleman; he is no 
friend of mine." Naturally Mrs. Sturgis would 
prefer Anthony Trollope. Now wouldn't it be 
nice if we could only swap prejudices once in a 
while? I have a few choice ones that I would 
like to be rid of. Mrs Sturgis might not unre- 
luctantly part with some of hers; however, she 
wears them lightly and by way of ornament. 
Perhaps her chains and heirloom brooches are as 
precious to her as are our masculine scarf pins 
and cuif links and some of them as remotely 
inherited. 



OUR MISS REPPLIER 

IF our Miss Reppller had been born In Boston 
and, after the inveterate habit of the true 
Bostonian, had refused to live anywhere else, 
how New England would boast of her as a signal 
evidence of New England's chronic superiority 
in letters. Or, if Miss Repplier had not resisted 
so contentedly the lure of " the metropolis " which 
sweeps the arts and the crafts which are, would 
be and pretend to be, into its golden maw, there 
to extinguish them, how would New York pro- 
claim to the world its discovery of the alertest, 
the sanest and the choicest of our American 
essayists? As it is, Miss Repplier has loyally 
elected to reside in Philadelphia and in conse- 
quence we take her as a matter of course. Ours 
is much the attitude of the father of Macaulay. 
Told that his son had carried off all the honors at 
Cambridge, he modestly replied: "That is pre- 
cisely what was to be expected of the son of 
Zachary Macaulay." Told that that son had 
become the foremost parliamentarian of his 
time, its greatest historian and essayist, his an- 
swer was: "I could expect no less." It was not 
in the power of a Thomas Babington Macaulay 
to surprise a Zachary; nor can a son or a daugh- 
ter of Philadelphia unruffleour superb complais- 
ancy — or is it our supine indifference? 

21 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

The range and the variety of the essay is 
sometimes lost sight of. It may be a chat over 
a wood fire about trivialities, pleasing and for- 
gettable. Or it may be much else, and it may 
strike deep into the heart of some matter — I 
detest the word problem — of momentary impor- 
tance and, like a searchlight, strike back into the 
past of experience or forward into the future of 
speculation. Miss Reppller, from the brilliancy 
of her wit and her incomparable power of illum- 
inating whatever she writes with it, is sometimes 
mistaken for a mere humorist, a master in 
mosaic, who would rather spear a jest, as some 
one misprinted it, than spare a friend. But in 
the now considerable body of her work — which 
he who does not know has ill kept up with the 
best commentary on our American thought — 
Miss Repplier has always a sane, an essentially 
serious, an open-minded point of view, a point of 
view moreover which walks not in the ranks of 
unthinking majorities nor prides itself on the 
other hand on singularity for singularity's sake. 
With all her raillery and mastery of ridicule. 
Miss Repplier is always on the side of the angels. 

"Points of Friction" is a happy title for a 
series of papers which deal with our current 
vagaries of thought and comment on things as 
various as woman, prohibition, spiritism, senti- 
mentality, the misuses of money, of humor and 

22 



OUR MISS REPPLIER 

optimism, the decay of conservatism and the like. 
It is refreshing to find an author unwilling to be 
bound by that silly unwritten agreement which 
banishes from our conversation and allusion any 
word about the war. It is refreshing too, to 
find Miss Repplier not wholly satisfied with 
things as we have contrived to malform them in 
our post-bellum antics, political and other. 

It is a strange obsession of the time that be- 
cause we can dash about from place to place 
with a celerity heretofore undreamed and com- 
municate our foolish thoughts to each other at 
the trifling expense of all privacy we are there- 
fore wiser and better than all the ages. And a 
contempt for the past follows in lives so occupied 
with the trivial present that we have no time 
to learn. In "The Virtuous Victorian" Miss 
Repplier delightfully turns the tables on our 
condescending portrayal of an age, an intellectual, 
and literary equality with which, with all our 
accomplishment, we dare not claim. In like 
spirit is the essay on "Living with History." 
with its appeal to the larger perspective, which 
is our birth-right, and the discard of which leads 
to so many of our vagaries in politics, religion 
and education. 

Timely, too, are the reminders that there 
have been other things than the love of gold to 
stir the passions of men, and sway the world — 

23 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

things such as "great waves of reHgious thought, 
great births of national Hfe, great discoveries, 
great passions and great wrongs." Could it be 
that this discreditable orgy of petty extortion 
and organized greed which now possesses us, this 
loss of the sense of honor and proportion in pub- 
lic as well as in private life, is, after all, only the 
reaction to the lax string after the tension that 
made us all more or less patriots? It is charity 
to the age to believe it. 

In another place Miss Repplier pays her 
respects to our contemporary American hero, 
"the athletic millionaire," who from an office 
boy or elevator man has become a luminary in 
high finance, and she wickedly points out his 
laureate, who from his pulpit expatiates upon 
his patron's virtues, especially his affability and 
kindliness to each of his fellow citizens in whom 
he condescendingly recognizes, after all, "one of 
God's creatures," like himself. Miss Repplier is 
never better in her merry mechante raillery of 
pretension and sycophancy. The golden calf, 
she tells us, "has never changed since it was first 
erected in the wilderness, the original model 
hardly admitting of improvement." And how 
delicious is the palpable hit: "There are Amer- 
icans who appear to love their country for much 
the same reason that Stevenson's 'child' loves 
the 'friendly cow': 

24 



OUR MISS REPPLIER 

" ' She gives me cream with all her might 
To eat with apple tart.' " 

And bettering her allusion in the turn which 
she gives it, as Miss Repplier usually does, she 
concludes: "When the supply of cream runs 
short the patriot's love runs shorter." And "he 
holds violent mass-meetings to complain of the 
cow, of the quality of the cream and of its dis- 
tribution." 

There are no more delightful papers than 
those on "Woman Enthroned," "The Strayed 
Prohibitionist" and "Dead Authors." This 
last warns us of our impending fate as readers 
when authors who have gone before and those 
who begin authorship in the next world shall 
communicate their ceaseless endeavors. Miss 
Repplier has noticed, with some other ob- 
servers, that the new spiritism has added to 
the horrors of the afterworld one never sug- 
gested even by the imaginations of Dante or 
Milton, and this is our complete loss, after death 
not only of all our talents, but even of our com- 
mon sense. She has noticed likewise that the 
spirit world is not notable for the gift of pro- 
phecy and seldom forestalls the newspapers. As 
a woman Miss Repplier recognizes — as many a 
man has recognized, but dare not avow it — that 
equality of man and woman involves equality of 
responsibility as well as equality of opportunity. 

25 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

And once again — also somewhat like a man, did he 
dare or could he say ithalf so well — Miss Repplier 
actually questions the certainty of the immed- 
iate regeneration of the world upon universal 
woman's suffrage. Some of Miss Repplier's 
sisters will have to look into this; it will never do. 
"The Strayed Prohibitionist" runs the gamut 
of drink, strong and sweet, through the literature 
of the ages, but so deftly and so trippingly that 
we are never oppressed by an allusiveness which 
is little short of amazing. But there is solid 
thought for more than the author queried in 
this: "I am convinced that if Mr. Galsworthy's 
characters ate and drank more they would be 
less obsessed by sex." It would be difficult to 
find a wiser summary of the whole law of pro- 
hibition than Miss Repplier's quotation from 
Milton: "They are not skilful considerers of 
human things who imagine to remove sin by re- 
moving the matter of sin. " 



ONE OF THE THREE GRACES 

IT HAS been my happy fortune to view for re- 
view, successively and of late, the estimable 
essays of two ladies, or to put it in elder wise, the 
essays of two estimable ladies — Mrs. Clipston 
Sturgis, in whom Boston rejoices, and our own 
Miss Repplier, whom, in true Philadelphia 
fashion, we appreciate, but not nearly enough. 
To complete this embarrassment of riches there 
comes to me now a third — and no minor third 
either — in Miss Winifred Kirkland, to complete 
the triad. And while my case is not quite that 
of fabled Paris of Troy, asked to judge between 
three goddesses, as well might one say, which is 
the loveliest of the graces, as determine, which of 
these skillful craftswomen in the delicate art 
of the essay is to carry off the palm from her 
sisters. However, I see no reason why the palm 
should be carried off or even paraded, and, re- 
membering what comparisons are, they are 
easily evaded. A more liberal lover am I than 
was ever doughty Captain Macheath, of "The 
Beggers' Opera," who could only have been 
happy with either. In this matter of essays, be 
they but written in the manner of these, and I 
can be happy with any or them all. 

Miss Kirkland, who will be remembered by 
many as the author of a striking essay in the 

27 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

Atlantic not very long since, "The New Death/' 
entitles her new volume "The View Vertical," 
in a clever introductory essay, contrasting the 
horizontal attitude of the body which was ours 
in our amoeban days back in the primeval slime, 
with our gradual rise through the ape to the hu- 
man's vertical or upright. It is a pleasing fancy 
that we stand thus, as men and women, facing 
life, to view things from the vantage of such 
stature as may be ours. And it may be said and 
truly that Miss Kirkland's own view is always 
the view forthright, frank, kindly, illuminated 
with a wit in decorous control and warmed 
with a humor that reaches humor's best ex- 
treme at times in tenderness of feeling. What 
pleasing titles are some of these. Miss Kirk- 
land's former volume was called "The Joys of 
Being a Woman," and Mrs. Sturgis indulged in 
"Random Reflections of a Grandmother." 
Moreover, how these our graces in the literary 
arts, are shutting mere miserable man out in the 
cold. They have us hopelessly beaten at the 
game; we who know only the neglected condition 
of being a man and, as grandfathers, are our- 
selves little more than reflections. Among the 
delectable titles of Miss Kirkland are "Con- 
fessions of a Scene Maker," "Stylish Stouts," 
"A SoHloquy on Sorting" and "Drudgery as a 
Fine Art," delightful in substance as well as in 



ONE OF THE THREE GRACES 

title. There is not one of these which does not 
subtly glory in the joy of being a woman. I will 
not say that only a woman can make a scene, 
though assuredly none can make one more suc- 
cessfully. "Stylish Stouts" suggests that we 
turn the other way lest we pry into business 
which is none of ours. It is only in drudgery, 
man's proper portion, that we share, and none 
of us can approach the art of the charming wo- 
man set forth by Miss Kirkland in this essay. 

Some time since a polite publisher returned 
the manuscript of a book of essays with a new 
excuse: It was too disjointed in subject matter. 
Table talk, a dictionary and the essay, these are 
the three things in life — about the only ones left 
— which have not been organized into consis- 
tency. One of the reasons for the fabled Mrs. 
Partington's fondness for dictionaries was that 
in the reading of them and of encyclopedias she 
found such a lively change of subject. Miss 
Kirkland's "Views Vertical" are ever consistent 
in their verticality, but her subject matter is as 
changing in mood and as varied in theme as even 
the heart of Mrs. Partington could wish. Dis- 
jointed forsooth! Why shouldn't we be dis- 
jointed.^ Whenever a man writes a book, does 
he enter into a contract to write a sermon or 
a disquisition, a treatise and drag a dismal, clank- 
ing chain of logic .^ Do we have to put off 

29 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

human nature the moment we get into print and 
be consistent, sequent and disquisitional? I am 
glad that women have undertaken to right this 
wrong, too, among the many wrongs they are 
hunting out now that they have their rights. 
Let us have the inalienable right of the essayist 
to say whatever she at least likes, to change her 
subject as often as her gown or her bonnet and 
decorate it as riotously. 

If I were asked to name the seven cardinal 
virtues of the essay — which like the cardinal 
virtues that sustain mankind and in their per- 
fect conjunction give rise to saintship — I should 
say that they are humor, ease, brevity and 
charm, and these be of the first order — for there 
is precedence even among cardinals — and, in 
second rank, wit, irony and paradox. Egotism 
or personality, you ask.f" All essays are about 
"myself," that is why, out of sympathy, we like 
them. Learning .f* Valuable in an essay in pro- 
portion as you contrive to conceal it. Miss 
Kirkland's humor is pervading; it is a quality 
inherent, not a thing sought and worn as an ex- 
ternal decoration. Take the perfect little essay 
"On Adopting One's Parents," founded on the 
paradox of an inversion of life's usual relation- 
ship; its method is delicate humor, shot with wit 
and deepening into a genuine sentiment which 
warms the heart as we read. "Hold Izzy" is 

30 



ONE OF THE THREE GRACES 

based on an incident none the less true, we may- 
well believe, that it is preposterous, in which a 
lady, the customer of a Jewish storekeeper, has 
Izzy, "a large and lusty babe," impulsively 
deposited in her arms by the father in his zeal to 
find something which the customer has come in 
to buy. But the humorous incident becomes a 
homily: "Some people are foreordained to hold 
Izzy. Some people are foreordained to have 
their Izzy held. I have held Izzy. I have had my 
Izzy held for me, but I am wondering: have I 
ever been Izzy myself." 

"Family Phrases" gives us a vivid glimpse 
into the intimacies of a rector's household which 
it would have been a delight and a privilege to 
have known. It is written all over with charm; 
and as to personality, if you miss it where it is 
everywhere, you are a very dull reader. I am 
not sure that I should not commend Miss Kirk- 
land for her command of the virtue of brevity as 
much as for anything else. Brevity is a sense — 
rather an intuition — for the certain evasion of 
the word too much. Few possess it; even fewer 
practice it. And more pictures are spoiled by 
the line too many than by the line too few. To- 
ward the end. Miss Kirkland's volume gravi- 
tates into books — though "gravitate" is not 
precisely the word. Our friend, Mr. Newton, 
may look to his laurels after a perusal of "The 

31 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

Man in the Dictionary," none other to be sure 
than Mr. Newton's own Dr. Johnson. And 
"Shakespeare and the Servant Problem" is aHke 
a contribution to the appreciation of Shake- 
speare and to a very pressing contemporary 
social problem. I like an essayist who sends me 
back to old friends. I shall read George Mere- 
dith's "Egotist" next time with my eye on 
young Crossjay, thanks to "A Boy in a Book"; 
and I may even get back again to "Robinson 
Crusoe." As to Jane Austen, thither I need no 
beguilement. In an adjustment of words of 
Izaak Walton: He who knows not Jane Austen 
nor Miss Kirkland's charming essay on * 'Vict- 
uals and Drink in Jane Austen's Novels" de- 
serves not to know either. 



THE QUAINTNESS OF MR. CROTHERS 

AN ingenious friend of mine has divided books 
L into two very definite and quite exclusive 
classes, the one of the other. These are the 
plus books and the minus books. This is not 
the same thing as the long books and the short 
ones; nor yet a matter dependent on the major 
or minor reputations of authorships. A plus 
book is a book the reading of which leaves the 
reader the better, the happier, the more hopeful; 
a book which appeals to what is good in you and 
lifts you a bit out of the slough and despondency 
of the world. A minus book is one which leaves 
the reader deprived, if not depraved, a book 
which clouds the sun and deafens the ear to the 
singing of birds and the prattle of children. A 
minus book may be true — most damnably true — 
it may be brilliant, imaginative, compelling, con- 
vincing; all this makes its minus quality the 
more certain, for it is art enlisted in the service 
of the enemy of mankind, who is always elbow- 
ing us into the slough of despond. Nor is a plus 
book that deadly thing, an improving book; for 
he who counts his gains in his reading like a 
tradesman the balance of his ledger, should be 
deprived of the sweet uses of literature. A plus 
book is one that adds something to the clarity of 
our vision or to our charity toward men. It is a 

33 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

book which helps, which vitalizes and ennobles; 
not one which debilitates and unnerves. 

In a new book by Mr. Crothers we are always 
sure of pleasure by the way, for he carries the 
torches of his quaint and original wit wherever 
he goes. We are sure likewise of something else, 
and that is of getting something tangible and to 
the good, not in the way of the brass counters of 
information, perhaps — for Mr. Crothers uses a 
coinage of a higher denomination and of a dif- 
ferent metal — but in the way of a clearer, a 
kindlier, a saner view of the topic under discussion. 

What an excellent thing it would be if we 
could catch some one of our busy "educators" 
and compel him to read and ponder such as essay 
as Mr. Crothers' "Dame School of Experience." 
Therein the author visits an ancient schoolhouse, 
older than the little red one which we sentimen- 
talize about, presided over by "a withered 
dame" who discourses tartly on education from 
troglodyte times to our no very different own. 
After considerable fencing, noting which our 
"educator" might learn much from that past 
into which he is too busy to look, the author 
comments: "You have really modern ideas 
after all. You believe in learning by doing. 
'Not exactly,' is the reply. 'At least not by 
doing what they (the pupils) are told to do. My 
pupils are always doing something or other — and 

34 



■■ 



QUAINTNESS OF MR. CROTHERS 

it is generally wrong. They have more activity 
than good sense. The world is full of creatures 
that are doing things without asking why. You 
can't educate a grasshopper. He is too busy 
hopping. The peculiarity of man is that some- 
times you can induce him to stop and think." 
Sometimes. Here is a thought for an "edu- 
cator": "The real teacher is a radical reformer 
who habitually uses the most conservative 
means to attain revolutionary ends," Notice 
the antithesis between "the real teacher" and 
"the educator," who, if Mr. Crothers will for- 
give a parody of his words, is a timorous stand- 
patter who incessantly employs revolutionary 
methods to attain mediocre results. 

Here is a passage from "The Teacher's 
Dilemma," on a subject much misunderstood: 
"Up to a certain point we all believe in the pro- 
cess of leveling up. We would raise the grade of 
the highway till it gives a convenient approach 
to our front door. Any uplifting of the road be- 
yond that would leave us in a hole. We cease to 
regard the public improvement as a betterment 
and bring suit for damages. " This, in its direct- 
ness, its truth, humor and point, is distinctive 
of the original and effective method of Mr. 
Crothers. His teaching is much by parable. 
Has our "educator" discovered anything better 
since last Tuesday morning? 

35 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

''Every Man's Natural Desire to be Some- 
body Else" searches into those dreams unreal- 
ized, those potentialities fated to remain such 
which lie hidden in the consciousness of us all. 
"The Perils of the Literate" finds in our very 
knowledge and reading the cause of many of our 
most cherished prejudices. The catechism in 
popular historical x)pinion as based on the pre- 
judices of reading is well put and it may well 
give us pause to inquire, each of himself : " Do you 
really know any London except that of Dickens ^ " 
or "To what extent has your older history of 
England been dependent on drama or fiction f " 

A droll idea — one thoroughly characteristic 
of Mr. Crothers — is that of a spiritual adviser of 
efficiency experts; and who could need any 
spiritual advice more sadly than he whose wor- 
ship is of the great god. Get-things-done ^ Not 
many years since the dean of a well known college 
boasted of a monthly session of his faculty in 
which, placing "the curve of ideal efficiency" 
(whatever that may mean) upon a blackboard, 
he compared with it the curve of each member of 
his unhappy official family, praising, admonish- 
ing, as the case might be and, as he put it, "main- 
taining a grip on things" — and on far more 
than things. Happily does Mr. Crothers say in 
another connection: "In dealing with a thing, 
you must first find out what it is, and then act 

36 



QUAINTNESS OF MR. CROTHERS 

accordingly. But with a person, you must find 
out what he is and then carefully conceal from 
him the fact that you have made the discovery. " 
Mr. Crothers' advice to the efficiency experts is 
sadly needed and nothing could be neater than 
the satire of the experts' extension of his 
"methods" for the shoveling of clay by Sobrin- 
sky and Flaherty, with the noted capacity of 
shovel and wheelbarrow and the time needed to 
move a hundred cubic feet of the same, to Good- 
win and Brown, transferrers of literature by means 
of daily themes into the minds of so many fresh- 
men in a given period of" loading and dumping." 
In one of the most significant of these essays, 
Mr. Crothers pays attention to that recurrent 
topic, the Pilgrim Fathers. There is much more 
than pleasantry in his criticism of our prevalent 
extension of the motives and ideals which 
brought about the American Revolution back- 
ward into Puritan times where they do not be- 
long. And the vivid picture of the Puritan 
spirit which he draws, especially in its emphasis 
on the state and its certainty as to its divine 
mission, is well brought into contrast with the 
vastly diiTerent ideals of the political equality of 
man which animated the politics of the Revo- 
lution. Mr. Crothers employs his learning, like 
his wit, in the interests of his subject, airing 
neither, but lighting his path with the steady 

37 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

glow of the one and the momentary superillu- 
minatlon of the other, as required. 

A timely word, too, is that on the "Unpre- 
paredness of Liberalism," in which the author 
calls seriously into question the notion that it is 
to the revolutionist alone that we owe human 
progress. Wisely does he admonish us that you 
cannot tear down your house and continue to 
live in it, or leave it unrepaired and not be ulti- 
mately driven out of it. Moreover, it is not the 
house that is in need of repairing, it is the man 
himself; and to kill him or leave him to his fate, 
neither is to cure him. Like all true idealists, 
Mr. Crothers is discouraged with the surge of 
materialism, selfishness and pettiness which is 
now englufing our struggling world. And Amer- 
ican leadership in all this is not enchanting. But 
steadfast, as a man of high hope, he writes of us 
as "in the dawn of a new day" in which, true to 
our essential nature, we shall yet take up our 
responsibilities, international as well as national 
and parochial. 



THE TERRIBLE MR. GOLDRING 

IS a man to be judged by what he reads — at 
least by what he reads in pubhc? Or is that 
"a question not to be asked"? In riding about 
on commuters' trams and others in America 
and in England, I have noticed a contrast in the 
nature of the reading of the average passenger. 
A five o'clock suburban in America is a wilder- 
ness of the afternoon papers, which flourishes 
as the leaves of Vallombrosa for four or five 
stations and then dies down into talk. On trains 
set for a longer journey our magazines of enter- 
tainment bud forth, making a chair-car a par- 
terre of color. But rarely does man or woman 
read a bound book; to open such is to proclaim 
oneself "a highbrow," which appears to be about 
as low a state as man can fall to. In England the 
daily newspapers do not appear to be so com- 
monly read on trains — at least of the better class, 
and on longer journeys substantial books are 
often read with apparent assiduity — for your 
Englishman would rather read a dull book than 
adventure conversation with a stranger. On a 
journey from Plymouth to London a few years 
ago, I counted a round dozen of my fellow pas- 
sengers reading bound books, and having the 
curiosity of a Christopher Morley in this parti- 
cular, I succeeded in ascertaining that most of 

39 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

them were novels, and moreover current novels 
of the nature and contents of which I remain 
impenitently ignorant. 

Before receiving Douglas Goldring's "Repu- 
tations" "to be reviewed," an advance circular 
came to me which whetted my curiosity. It 
seems that the book has "created a sensation," 
it has been acrimoniously attacked and vigor- 
ously defended; it has become in consequence 
that enviable thing, "a brisk seller"; authentic 
authorship has always its foundations in the 
seller. And I naturally looked into "Who's 
Who," wherein are gathered, together with the 
famous, so many to whom, on inquiry, the owls 
of oblivion will shortly echo back " Who-Who"! 
And behold; the name of Goldring, unlike that of 
Abu-ben-Adhem, did not lead the rest; it was not 
there. An Oxford man, an editor, subeditor and 
publisher of several journals, defunct or still sur- 
viving, the author of "a very charming book of 
poems entitled 'Streets,' " of books of travel, of 
a play, and thirty-one years of age — and not in 
"Who's Who"! Our suspicions as to the de- 
cayed internal condition of Denmark must be 
extended to England, particularly when we 
glean, as we may from "Reputations," that Mr. 
Goldring is an international socialist in consti- 
tutional disagreement with Mr. Lloyd George 
and severely critical of Mr. Wells, when we hear 

40 



THE TERRIBLE MR. GOLDRING 

that Mr. Goldring Is "secretary of the Clarte 
movement," which wise people will know all 
about, but as to which a humble reviewer of 
books — only books — must confess to a supreme 
ignorance. I have not been able to scrape to- 
gether much more about Mr. Goldring; for not 
being in "Who's Who," there is no record of his 
favorite sport. From " Reputations, " however 
I should infer that it is not war, unless it be car- 
ried on by way of reviews. 

"Reputations" is a well-written collection of 
papers, less on matters of moment than on 
things of the moment. The appreciation of the 
late James Elroy Flecker is timely, interesting 
and, allowing for Its contemporaneousness and 
wholly creditable bias of friendship, just and 
fair. "Reputations" has in It much wit and an 
abundance of clever hitting which one might 
enjoy the better were he nearer the ropes. 
Whether Mr. Goldring has really administered 
the knockout blow to the reputations of several 
of his small novelist victims, it is quite impos- 
sible to say at this distance. Due to the above- 
mentioned American habit of reading the news- 
papers instead of contemporary minor fiction — 
In which we are perhaps not much further from 
reality. I do not find myself bristling with 
Intelligence when I hear of "the author of 
*Tarr, ' " nor do I feel sympathetically exas- 

41 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

perated with the "Outburst on Gissing. " I 
gather from Mr. Goldring that his friend, Mr. 
D. H. Lawrence — a poet whom I know and 
admire for much that is sound and vital — is 
the only immediately contemporary writer of 
novels who can be safely accepted. And I 
am in no mood to argue the question. I am 
willing to accept the pungent criticisms of Messrs. 
Mackensie, Cannon and Walpole, the three 
"Georgian novelists" whom Mr. Goldring sin- 
gles out for his especial censures, and I find the 
paper on " Clever Novels " very pleasant reading, 
like a book of travels into some heartily unimpor- 
tant country whither I should never care to go. 
I suppose that the sundry people who are 
mawled in this paper — they and their friends — 
must feel bad about it. But it seems afar off and 
trivial to one deprived of the joy of living in the 
purlieus of literary London, one who, moreover, 
would rather read something else than third- 
rate fiction. 

Apparently they take these things quite seri- 
ously in England. Were it anywhere else we 
might be tempted to call it provincial. However 
Mr. Goldring has some happy phrases: "A 
fringe of distinguished dull dogs who wrote 
books"; "a deafening silence broken only by the 
sound of the white rabbits of criticism scuttling 
to cover"; "A writer is never so much a man 

42 



THE TERRIBLE MR. GOLDRING 

and a brother (or a woman and a sister) as when 
he (or she) Is behaving Hke a toad"; and the 
positively briniant designation of Mr. Arnold 
Bennett as "the Gordon Selfredge of English 
letters"; and If you do not know what that 
means, kind-hearted reader, It Is worth a journey 
to London to find out. Mr. Goldring has a 
pleasant little story of an Interview with Mr. 
Watts-Dunton; of a momentary undignified 
contact with the great George Bernard; and 
there Is a delightful anecdote of an Irish Hon In 
letters and his roaring on psycho-analysis before 
a bevy of entranced schoolmarms " convoked from 
GIrton College"; but It Is too profane to repeat. 
Mr. Goldring hates war, which does not seem 
very remarkable; he apparently also hates most 
war poetry, In which we heartily concur. He 
excepts that, however, of Mr. Sasoon, Mr. 
SItwell and others. He agrees with somebody 
parenthetically, the matter being thus best dis- 
posed of, that Swinburne, Is a minor poet. He 
does not say It, but we Infer that major poets 
only write In the present. However, he has some 
creditable likings, about which he Is depreca- 
tory, for certain old things Victorian. With the 
courage of youth he defends certain "low 
tastes, " as he calls them, of his own and of others, 
among them a liking for detective stories, for 
books of travel — one wonders why — and for the 

43 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

revue (we call that sort of thing "musical" 
comedy). Mr. Goldring even takes up the 
cudgels in defense of the chorus girl and justi- 
fies the admiration which youth becomingly 
feels for her sedulous industry in her "difficult 
art," her good form in it, so to speak, and her 
other good points — although this last hardly 
seems the word. Best of all I like the enticing 
little essay, "Redding on Wines," though tell 
it not in Volstead. It is agreeable to see the 
young active, interested in these things which 
they like and expressive of this precious moment 
in which we are now living. Certainty as to all 
things mundane at the least, sweeping divisions 
(as Mr. Goldring confesses was Flecker's as 
to poets into "magnificent" and such as write 
"godforsaken muck"), oblivion as to the past, 
dilation of things present — such are among the 
prerogatives of youth. Mr. Goldring is less 
"young" than many of his brothers and he is 
quite engaging at times in the act of dragging 
people about. His views, too, as to many of 
these little matters are altogether just. But as 
to these presentists of the unimportant and 
their often cubicular deliverances, is perspective 
to become wholly a lost art.? 



A MAN OF THE HAPPY MEAN 

IN the daily course of our lives there are two 
areas, so to speak, in the community which 
attract pubHc attention. There is first the mass 
by its mere mass in which we may find much 
that we could wish were otherwise, but the 
honest contemplation of which, when all has been 
said, should leave us undismayed as to human 
nature. Secondly, there are those who stand dis- 
tinguished for effort and what we call promi- 
nence, it may be in public life, in letters, in 
society, even in conspicuous wrongdoing. Be- 
tween these two flows the main current of our 
American life, composed of those who are neither 
submerged nor partially submerged in the 
struggle for existence, nor yet of their contrasted 
fellows who have reached a momentary gleam 
in the sunshine of repute, whether to their fame 
or their scandal. 

And these quiet, serene and comfortable folk 
of the centre are the very mainstay of our cult- 
ure and our civilization. They never descend 
into the morasses of radicalism, nor tempt dan- 
gerous agnostic heights. It would be unjust to 
class them with the standpatters who encumber 
the road with their frequent stallings; for their 
motion is honestly forward and they keep to the 
middle of the road. The folk of the centre be- 

45 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

lieve in God and, to their credit be it said, try to 
take a kindly and practical Christianity into 
their lives. They respect the past without prying 
into it; they live in the present — which is the 
only sane way in which to live; and they look 
forward hopefully to the future, in which they 
may feel just a little too confident of their own 
salvation, though it cannot be denied that they 
hope — just a little against hope, a very little — 
that others may be saved likewise. 

The "Life and Letters of the late Hamilton 
W. Mabie" is an interesting book, biograph- 
ically and socially. From one point of view 
Mabie's was a singularly uneventful career. 
There is no uncertainty, no struggle in it. The 
reasonable comforts, excellent education, oppor- 
tunity, all were his, and all were grasped hon- 
estly and employed to the full. Industry with 
the just fruits of the harvest, service cheerfully 
accepted and faithfully performed, achievement 
and recognition and hosts of friends, all these too 
were his and deservedly his; Mabie's was an in- 
tegrity that knew no swerving, a sweet reason- 
ableness that allayed friction rather than avoided 
it, a hopeful cheerfulness that got much out of 
life which foreboding and discontent lose. It 
would be difficult to imagine a more congenial 
life than was Mr. Mabie's, that is to a man of 
his temperament; the editor of an influential 

46 



A MAN OF THE HAPPY MEAN 

magazine of liberal Christian opinion, a har- 
monious coworker for good with men Hke Dr. 
Lyman Abbott and later ex-President Roosevelt, 
a platform lecturer — nearly if not quite the last 
of the interesting older type — greatly in request 
and welcomed wherever he went, prominent in 
the service of a reasonable churchmanship, a 
progressive in education and liberal in politics, 
and a writer whose books were always timely and 
pleasantly written and read by thousands — such 
a career is as enviable as its success was deserved. 
This book discloses many pleasant intimacies 
and friendships, from a momentary contact as a 
student with Emerson and later with Lowell and 
an editorial intimacy with the late President 
Roosevelt in the latter years of his life, through 
abiding friendships with the poets, Stedman and 
Aldrich, and our great novelist, Howells and 
with Burroughs, Henry van Dyke and Wood- 
berry the last two of whom are still happily with 
us. A man who could have inspired such varied 
and such faithful friendships had in him much to 
warm the hearts of men. And such was un- 
doubtedly true of Mabie. Few who have had to 
do even remotely with letters have failed in these 
latter years to have met or at least to have 
heard Mr. Mabie. He was the happiest and 
most tactful of presiding officers, fit and 
graceful in what he had to say and appealing 

47 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

always to what was best and kindest in human 
nature. I have personally but one trivial little 
anecdote of Mr. Mabie. He was here in Phila- 
delphia on one occasion to lecture and in some 
way I was conducting him somewhere in the 
wilds of West Philadelphia beyond even that 
remote region to which the University of Penn- 
sylvania has since extended. It was spring and 
the grass was growing — alas! it must be con- 
fessed — between the bricks of the pavement on 
which we walked. Rather to disarm critical 
New York than for any other reason, I remarked 
that it was only too true that the grass grew in 
the streets of Philadelphia. And at that mo- 
ment a tiny snake about the size of an angle- 
worm wiggled across our way; whereupon Mr. 
Mabie said, "Yes, and I am sorry to see that 
there are snakes in it," and he seemed really 
sorry despite the twinkle in his eye. 

It is early to estimate the service of the late 
Mr. Mabie as an author, if we are talking, as is 
the wont, of that fine thing, services to posterity. 
If we are talking of the present, which is wiser 
as well as more pertinent, it is much to have 
served the contemporary needs of the quiet, 
serene and comfortable folk of the centre, the 
readers of the Outlook, for a generation and to 
have served them so faithfully and so well. 
There have been more brilliant Lives of Shake- 

48 



A MAN OF THE HAPPY MEAN 

speare than that of Mr. Mable, few so sympathet- 
ic and so sincere. There have been books on 
nature, of hterary appreciation and of spiritual 
admonition which the pundits of criticism may 
rate above those of Mabie, but it is doubtful if 
many of them so adequately and so whole- 
somely served their immediate purpose. The 
writings of Hamilton Mabie perturbed and 
troubled nobody. They led many to a kindlier 
and saner attitude toward life, and they strength- 
ened a beautiful confidence which it is well to 
know still lingers in quiet places that all is work- 
ing out to the good. Allowing for an ethical 
trend in Mabie which the English essayist vent- 
ured not, I like to think of the work of Hamilton 
Mabie in the terms which Leigh Hunt, once 
used as to his own cheerful, easy, adequate prose: 
"These essays of mine were never intended to be 
more than birds singing in the trees." Is there 
anything sweeter, truer, more pertinent than 
wholesome gladness in a world which sadly needs 
it.^ Gladness, hopefulness, helpfulness and the 
happy mean. Honor to the memory of him who 
so maintained them. 



"THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY" 

IT might be difficult to find a more attractive 
subject than this, the art of biography, not a 
mere enumeration of that enormous category of 
books, those written about other people, but a 
talk on the manner, the nature, the art of the 
thing. Delivered originally in the shape of lec- 
tures on the Barbour-Page Foundation at the 
University of Virginia, Mr. William Roscoe 
Thayer has contrived to give to his little book 
the charm that belongs to the familiar essay 
while losing none of the meat of a topic not to be 
mooted except on the basis of a scholarship both 
broad and sound. 

Biography is in a sense an outgrowth of 
history; and without cavil be it said that bio- 
graphy is always close in its allegiance to fiction. 
Historians are still much agog over the momen- 
tous question how to write history. Is the nar- 
rative of a series of events, or the narrative of a 
man's life, to be regarded in the nature of a map 
or in the nature of a picture .f* Do we read the 
past as we lay out a journey, the chief object 
being that we may find our path and not go 
astray at the wrong turning.^ Or should we read, 
somewhat at least, as many would prefer to 
walk or to ride abroad, for beauty and signif- 
icance of scene and the exhilaration of motion.? 

50 



"THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY" 

In a map you can identify this village and that 
hillside and determine with accuracy the rela- 
tions of the topography of the country at large. 
In a picture you lose most of these particular- 
ities, but in place you have light and shadow and 
atmosphere out of which comes the recognition 
of reality. Mr. Thayer has some valuable pages 
on what might be called the three volume 
modern statesmen series of biographies, in which 
variety of "life" the map is meticulously drawn 
in every petty and trivial detail and the subject 
is seen as in a glass darkly. The case of Mrs. 
Charles Kingsley's life of her eminent husband 
should be kept in mind by those who, under the 
stress of example and for hire, write long lives. 
She reduced her two volume book to one and it is 
surprising how much was gained in the reduction. 
It has been suggested above that biography is 
close in its nature to fiction. This last is one of 
those troublesome words which can hardly be em- 
ployed without a double or a threefold meaning. 
To tell a thing which never happened as if it had 
actually occurred may be either art or falsehood. 
It may be both. DeFoe is credited with an 
unexcelled power in "grave and imperturbable 
lying." But DeFoe was likewise an artist; and 
many an occurrence of the novelists', the dram- 
atists' or the poets' fiction, though never an 
actual fact, is truer in the large than are often 

SI 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

the recurring falsities of life. The old-fashioned 
historians, Thucydides and Livy, always put 
a line rhetorical speech into the mouths of 
leaders before the sounding of a charge. This is 
sometimes very absurd, but when, as often in the 
former of these great writers, these speeches and 
their like in other situations are nicely calculated 
to reveal the personality of the speaker, his point 
of view on the occasion and the like, we have art, 
not lying. Such outworn methods biographical 
are scarcely as reprehensible as our weary 
marshaling of "all the facts," with the result of 
a wooden image instead of the portraiture 
of a man. 

Mr. Thayer's long experience as a historian 
and his distinguished success as well in the writ- 
ing of biography give to his words in appraise- 
ment and on the practice of his art a peculiar 
authority. It is good, therefore, to have our 
faith in the pre-eminence of Plutarch's "Lives" 
for antiquity and Boswell's "Johnson" for our 
own day so unmistakably reaffirmed. It is 
better still to have our own somewhat nebulous 
arguments on these subjects so ably and au- 
thoritatively re-enforced. We hear from the 
Shakespeareans that Plutarch alone of all his 
sources was the one which Shakespeare could not 
better at all times; and that despite the fact that 
the old dramatist read his life of Caesar and of 

52 



"THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY" 

Marc Antony only in an English translation of 
a French translation of a Latin translation of a 
Greek original. When we add to this that 
Plutarch himself wrote long after the waning of 
"the glory that was Greece" and "the grandeur 
that was Rome," the freshness of his material, 
its vitality and power become the greater mar- 
vel. Mr. Thayer finds, among much else, that 
Plutarch's power lies largely in hisdefiningeachof 
his personages with a daylight clarity, in the cir- 
cumstance that he was a great and wholesome 
moralist, and in his coming into his art most 
happily before the world had turned to intro- 
spection and become more interested in how one 
thing becomes something else, than in either 
thing in itself. 

To medieval biography the author gives no 
disproportionate space. His words of Eginhard's 
"Life of Charlemagne" invite us back to that 
important, but forgotten, bit of biography, which 
is conspicuous among biographical writings for 
its artistic brevity. In three famous works the 
author finds medieval biography well typified: 
they are De Joinville's life of the saintly knight, 
Louis IX, the beautiful altruistic "Fioretti or 
Little Flowers " of Saint Francis and the " Imita- 
tion of Christ," that notable tractate on the 
pressing question" How shall I save my own soul ? " 
Another source for Shakespeare, Cavendish's 

53 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

"Life of Cardinal Wolsey, " bridges us over 
by way of Roper's "Life of Sir Thomas 
More," and Izaak Walton's delightful "Lives," 
to modern times. To voice a personal taste, I 
could wish that there had been more room for 
autobiography, though that is really a very dif- 
ferent subject; and I miss two important and 
favorite old books, the omission of which I confess 
none the less might be readily defended. They 
are Fulke Greville's "Life of Sir Philip Sidney," 
which is a "life" and likewise a great deal more, 
and the delectable "Autobiography" of Lord 
Herbert of Cherbury. 

On modern biography this little book is ex- 
ceedingly suggestive. It has always been a mat- 
ter of wonder that the greatest of all English 
biographers, James Boswell, should have been 
the coxcomb that he was, and the contrasted 
portraits of Boswell as drawn respectively by 
Macaulay and by Carlyle have been time out of 
mind matter of comment. Boswell was a cox- 
comb, but a sheer fool does not write the great- 
est biography in the English language. Boswell 
is often accredited with being the first bio- 
grapher to document his case and let the subject 
tell his own story. This is not quite wholly true 
and when Dr. Johnson did tell his own story in 
his "Autobiography," he made a poor fist of it. 
Boswell was really a splendid literary artist 

54 



"THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY" 

endowed with a marvelous sense of proportion, 
howsoever some have said that he did not know 
a triviality as such when he saw one. And again, 
Boswell was in love with his subject, and the 
wit, the learning, the odd and distinguished 
personality of the great Cham of letters made 
him a peculiarly happy subject for minute por- 
traiture. These are some of the reasons why 
Boswell will outlive the biography of that 
greater man, Carlyle, told malevolently, if not 
dishonestly, by Froud, or other notable "lives," 
such as that of Tennyson, related by his son, or 
that of Scott, by Lockhart, a son-in-law, ad- 
mirable as this latter assuredly is. Relatives are 
congenitally too near to view a biographical 
subject in a true perspective. There should be a 
law against the dragging out of any man's lares 
and penates by such as overloved or over- 
envied him. To that last phrase of the biograph- 
ical sketch, " he was happy even in his death, " is 
to be added another, "rare as violets in winter's 
snow," "He was blessed in his biographer." 



"POTTERISM" 

lOTTERISM." The word Is an inspira- 
tion. We have wanted It now this many 
a day; for it is a short cut over the fields for a 
thing which we have had to go around to get at; 
a neat cover into which to roll up a bundle of 
ideas which have been dangling loose for a long 
time. And what is "Potterism.^" Like most 
words it roots in several directions. Let a sugges- 
tion suffice. A potter is obviously one who 
makes pots or jugs, usually of clay; and clay — 
which is much the stuff out of which men and 
women are made as well — Is an unctuous, un- 
stable, shapable material with which vessels of 
various kinds may be fashioned, baked and half- 
baked; and, even when finally glazed andpainted, 
they remain fragile and are easily broken. 

A famous text, the source of which, knowing 
reader, Is not the Bible, reads: "One touch of 
nature makes the whole world kin." You may 
preach a sermon on It, Mr. Minister, or adorn 
a peroration with It, Mr. Orator, especially If 
you do not happen to know what it means. 
Now this "touch" Is not what careless pulpit 
eloquence often makes it, the innate nobility, 
the common humanity of man, that which 
makes each of us one of the universal human 
brotherhood. This Is pretty, but It Is not true. 

S6 



"POTTERISM" 

The touch of nature is really what the theologian 
knows as original sin, what you and I call "the 
old Adam" in each of us; for the "touch" is the 
taint of human fallibility, the weakness which 
leaves each one of us, if the truth be told when 
all is said, not much better than his neighbor. 
This is true though I confess that it is notprctty. 
But what has this to do with "Potterism?" 
Shakespeare's "one touch of nature" is "Pot- 
terism." 

"Potterism," the book, is a story of now, in 
which the figures are so typical that they assume 
a universal truth. The book is well written, at 
times brilliantly. Apothegm and epigram piled 
on epigram and apothegm make much of it ex- 
cellent reading. Somewhat less successful is the 
effort to make various parts of the story appear 
the utterances of individual characters, but this 
is not important to the general plan, which is 
well carried out. The real essence of the book is 
satire of our muddling, superficial, self-seeking 
preposterous modern civilization, which is ban- 
tered, laughed at, shown up and mocked as it 
deserves. But very unlike many such books, 
"Potterism" neither brings us a cure-all, which 
turns out to be as preposterous as what it rid- 
icules, nor does it conclude either in despair or in 
some faint-hearted consolation, religious or 
social, that means nothing. It is one of the 

57 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

merits of this book that it leaves us whole- 
somely unconsoled. 

"Potterism," we are told amongst much else, 
is "mainly an Anglo-Saxon disease, worst of all 
in America, that great home of commerce, suc- 
cess and the boosting of the second rate." "Pot- 
terism" welcomes prosperity and ugliness, propri- 
ety and cant. "The Potterite has the kind of 
face which is always turned away from facts 
* * hard, jolly facts with clear, sharp edges, 
that you can't slur or talk away." "Potterism" 
has no use for them. It appeals over their 
heads to prejudices and sentiment." "Potter- 
ism" is all for short and easy cuts and showy 
results. It plays a game of grab all the time and 
snatches its success in a hurry. The Potter God 
"is some being apparently like a sublimated 
Potterite, who rejoices in bad singing, bad art, 
bad praying and bad preaching, and sits aloft to 
deal out rewards to those who practice these and 
punishments to those who do not. " "Potterism 
has no room for Christianity. It prefers the God 
of the Old Testament." However, "the Pot- 
terites have taken Christianity and watered it 
down to suit themselves." The Potterite is 
capable, adaptable, acquisitive and greedy. He 
does things for what there is in them for him, no 
matter how much they may seem to be done for 
others. The social worker who prates "service" 

58 



"POTTERISM" 

and draws a handsome salary, the minister whose 
eloquence and social qualifications "call" him to 
the charge of a congregation of wealth and social 
prominence where he need no longer slum, the 
man who writes books which shall be most 
abundantly salable or paints portraits which 
shall bring him most into vogue — all of these are 
Potterites. And the distinction is drawn between 
all these and him — supposing he can any- 
where be found — who seeks truth singly for the 
love of truth or beauty in art or in living for art 
and for life. In a word, disinterestedness is the 
one certain thing which "Potterism" is not; the 
disinterestedness of heart as to one's fellow men, 
the disinterestedness of mind that knows not 
commercialized results. How very impractical? 
Yes, "Potterism" Is nothing if It is not prac- 
tical. For "Potterism" loathes figures, unless 
they fall on the credit side. It talks much of 
principles — but prefers interest. It would rather 
face naked steel than a naked fact — It is so im- 
proper. "Potterism" dotes on the past which it 
recreates with a commonplace Imagination and 
a loving sentimentalism Into something smack- 
ing of lavender and respectability. "Potterism" 
Is smug, persistent, stubborn and In all these 
traits and many others upsets any moral stand- 
ard with which to apply the doctrine of the 
survival of the fittest. The basis of its philoso- 

59 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

phy might be stated In the words. "I am the 
fittest, therefore I survive. " But why attempt 
to emulate the wit of Miss Macaulay, whose 
story even better than her epigrams details the 
true symptoms of this universal human malady.'' 
Miss Macaulay's hero Is half a Jew and half a 
Russian, which is certainly flying in the face of 
contemporary "Potterism." He is not a theorist 
who, by force of Intellect, overthrows the world, 
only a man clear-sighted and unprejudiced 
enough to see the folly of it and human enough 
not to transcend human frailty. He is not tri- 
umphant, like a true Potterite hero, but falls in 
the end a victim equally to "Potterism" and to 
its two opposltes, whichever is which, white or 
red, In Russia. The twins, John and Jane, with 
their parallel university educations, their critical 
ideas and experiences in the Potterite world, 
of which they are part, seem not without a cast 
at a certain Joan and Peter, one of the rungs of 
a long ladder, by means of which a certain his- 
torian of the universe has attained to univer- 
sality. The twins are commonplace, clever 
young people, clear sighted enough intellect- 
ually to know a Potterite on sight, except when 
looking In a looking glass. But their souls are 
Potterlsh, wherefore they do what they like, 
get what they want, or nearly, succeed in the 
success of the world, which all so love, and 

60 



"POTTERISM" 

remain to the end, like the rest of us, essentially 
devotees to "Potterism." 

Your reviewer is not by nature a pessimist, 
nor does he seek to acquire pessimism. But 
pessimism, alas! in these late days, is thrust 
upon us — most persistently thrust upon us. 
And the thrust is often difficult to parry. With 
ideals flouted and the idealist a pariah in his 
own "land of idealism," and with an insensate 
world joyously slipping back Into barbarism and 
skilfully mixing the cup for the next deadly 
draught of war, it Is well that some of us can still 
retain that superiority of man over ■ the beast, 
the gift of laughter, even if it be Ironic. There is 
really nothing in the world so incredible as a 
man — unless it be a woman. Wherefore, analy- 
sis of self being unpleasant — and also unwhole- 
some — read "Potterlsm." 



JOSEPH CONRAD ON LIFE AND 
LETTERS 

ACQUAINTANCE with books is much Hke 
. acquaintance with men: the wider our circle, 
the greater the chances of friendship; however, 
knowledge may bring with it disenchantment as 
well as enchantment. After all, we may know 
many and yet love but few; though when we 
think of the variety in mankind and in bookkind, 
we should readily become catholic, if not in our 
tastes at least in our discernments. I can like 
almost any book — except a cash book, which is a 
thing to many of us deceptive, troublesome to 
keep, and misleading in title. For, as with men, 
in almost every book there is some good. In 
these "Notes on Life and Letters," by the fa- 
mous novelist, Joseph Conrad, there seems to me 
only good, for theirs is the discontinuousness, 
the variety, the intimacy of good talk. In them 
is neither the formality of the essay, the irrel- 
evancy of letters written for some specific pur- 
pose, nor the limitation to subject which fiction 
demands and receives from so conscientious a 
novelist as Mr. Conrad. This book lets us into 
the personality of a man who is nowhere 
obtrusive or given to attitudinizing; it is like a 
letter of introduction to him and he receives his 
reader as a friend. 

62 



JOSEPH CONRAD ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

To those of us who Hve contentedly in one 
locaHty all our lives, convinced that any one born 
elsewhere is rather to be pitied, if not mistrusted, 
a life such as that of Mr. Conrad's must seem not 
only strange but all but miraculous. To be born 
within the confines of that shadowy designation 
of the ghost of a sometime country, Poland — now 
once again a living, romantic reality — to have 
chosen deliberately the sea as a vocation — Poland 
having no more seacoast than Shakespearean 
Bohemia; and then to have achieved the rank of a 
leading writer in a tongue with which his young 
manhood found him wholly unacquainted; 
these are marvels to such of us as live at 
home in our back yards and acquire with our 
milk teeth each his own provincial nasality in the 
pronunciation of what Mr. Menken calls "the 
American language. " 

I once knew a clever foreigner who argued 
that transplanting from one soil into another, if 
the tree endures it at all, is likely to beget a more 
vigorous and luxuriant growth; and that, by the 
same token, the man who early enough in his life 
changes his nationality and even his language, if 
he takes root and brings anything with him from 
the country of his birth, will have two eyes with 
which to behold the world instead of one. In two 
or three languaged men we often find a liberality 
of view not characteristic of him only to the 

63 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

manner born. Of this Mr. Conrad is an example 
in the cosmopoHtan spirit which is his, a spirit, 
however, which has not deprived him either of 
a fervent love for his mother Poland, nor of de- 
votion to his adopted mother England. The 
several papers on Poland in this volume are of a 
revealing worth and excellence, Mr. Conrad 
knows his subject and loves his native country 
with a romantic passion, which, however, does 
not obscure his comprehension. "The Crime of 
Partition," a round, unvarnished tale, is worth 
half the lengthy histories on this murder of a 
nation; the "Note on the Polish Problem" sets 
forth with striking brevity the plight of what was 
still at the time of its writing (1916) the wraith of 
a remembered wrong. And in "Poland Re- 
visited" speaks in concentrated fervor the 
wanderer returning to what was once his. 

It is in "Poland Revisited" that Mr. Conrad 
tells how in that fateful summer of 1914 he 
accepted an invitation to visit Cracow, trav- 
ersing the North Sea and Germany just before 
the declaration of war, which caught him in 
Russia, from which he with difficulty at length 
escaped by way of Vienna to Italy and back to 
England. It must be gratifying to Americans to 
know that the protection of the American eagle 
was extended over him in the process, something 
he forgets not to mention with the name of Mr. 

64 



JOSEPH CONRAD ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

Pennfield, whose many services to those In like 
plight will be long remembered. But the hold of 
this paper upon the reader is for its reminiscences 
and its descriptive touches of that great North 
Sea on which Mr. Conrad began his seafaring. 
As he sits in the train in the Liverpool station, 
about to start, he recalls his first arrival as a boy 
of nineteen in London on that spot. He had 
come off of one ship and was seeking another to 
ship before the mast to Australia. He had noth- 
ing but the fragment of a map of London to 
guide him to an obscure "Dickenslike nook of 
London," he calls it, there to find the man who 
was to place him. And he tells us that it never 
occurred to him to seek his way in a conveyance. 
Strange contrast between this foreign lad, un- 
known to any one of the millions in the great sea 
of humanity, and the approved, successful 
author with his volumes of achievement, his 
hosts of friends, his family and the place in the 
world which he has made his. Truly, some trees 
wax luxuriant in the transplanting. 

Two or three absorbing papers are those on 
various aspects of the loss of the Titanic, in which 
the expert in the affairs of the sea, as well as the 
humanitarian, speaks out. Little could Mr. 
Conrad have known that what man inflicts on 
man was to sink this terrible disaster into insignif- 
icance within a year or two. But it is in such 

65 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

papers as "Well Done" or "Tradition," in 
which the man who followed the sea for twenty 
years tells of the quality, the simplicity, the 
courage of the British merchant service which he 
knew so well, it is in these that we taste the 
Conrad of "The Nigger of the Narcissus." The 
former of these in its effort to explain "this 
unholy fascination" of the sea, with its story of 
the one thief whom the writer had ever met in 
the service, a thief less through dishonesty than 
adventure; the finding of the heart of the sea- 
man's loyalty in service, and the essence of manli- 
ness in work, these are fine things, finely said. 
And there are exhibits of rightness, if I may put 
it so, as to autocracy, the censorship of plays, the 
after life and what not. But the best thing about 
the book — and it is the best thing that can be 
said about a book — is to find in it the revelation 
of a man thinking manly without prejudice or 
sophistications, literary or social. If it is salt 
water that can thus clear our eyes and our per- 
ceptions, would that moreof us werebaptizedinit. 



THEOPHRASTUS IN KANSAS 

I HAVE found only one superfluous adjective in 
this book — and that is that work-horse or 
clothes-horse, "admirable," sandwiched be- 
tween "her" and "sex": a case, so to speak, of 
attraction of the obvious. Ordinarily the super- 
numerary adjectives of the average book, excised 
and gathered together, would reduce the whole 
volume about ten per cent. Any conspicuous 
lack of the superfluous, if we are so lucky as any- 
where to happen upon it, we are apt to refer to 
Yankee reticence; and much might be said of the 
brevity of reticence and also of the barrenness of 
a soil which cannot be made to produce much 
anyhow. This "Anthology" shows that with 
other excellences cornered in the markets of the 
moralities by the Puritans, brevity may flourish 
even in the wide spaces of Kansas. In point of 
fact artists call this quality by a better term, 
economy of stroke; and economy of stroke is a 
notable quality in Mr, Howe's "Another Town." 
A certain eastern professor was lecturing 
some years ago in literary Indianapolis and, 
asked about himself, confessed that although 
caught early in an eddy that had carried his 
family back East and reversed the usual flow 
westward, he was actually born in Indiana. 
Whereupon an enthusiastic native of that literary 

67 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

state exclaimed: "When you get down to brass 
tacks, all these here lit'rary fellers hails from 
Indiany. " Edgar Watson Howe was born in 
Indiana and got his schooling in Missouri, thus 
resembling Mark Twain in the most important 
part of a man's education. Mr. Howe is no 
stranger as a writer to such as keep abreast of the 
times, as his successful books, "Ventures in 
Common Sense" and "The Story of a Country 
Town," attest. This "Anthology of Another 
Town" is named in reference to the book just 
mentioned. It is something thus to have put 
two towns on the map, to say nothing of 
Atchison on the globe. Mr. Menken says that 
Howe is "America incarnate," and, like Dad, 
Mr. Menken knows. 

The "Anthology of Another Town" is not a 
story, nor a collection of essays, much less the 
disjointed paragraphs of a columnist. Each 
item — which word better expresses it than 
chapter, or section (as they range from several 
pages down to four or five lines of prose in print) 
— each item, as I was saying, is complete in itself 
and might stand alone anywhere. But there is 
unity in tone, manner and purpose of all that 
completes a picture despite the independence of 
each part. In fact if I were looking for a term of 
classification I should revive the old word 
"character," for Mr. Howe's book; only the 

68 



THEOPHRASTUS IN KANSAS 

"character, " from its original in Theophrastus to 
Hall and Overbury in old England, was usually 
more in the nature of a set description, a bit of 
portraiture and commonly satirical in intent. 
Mr. Howe in these Httle sketches of the actual- 
ities and trivialities of a small western town has 
contrived to put off satire with its limitations and 
to rid himself of all the literary furbelows. The 
result makes for the economy of stroke of which 
I have just written; it produces an effect some- 
times almost bald (the accompanying danger of 
simplicity carried to a logical conclusion); but 
more often it achieves its purpose where elab- 
oration would fail. Humor, the touch of pathos 
on occasion, a faithfulness to verity always — all 
these things are incidental and arise out of the 
subject: never are they thrust into it. 

For example, one of the longer "characters" 
tells of a "city journalist" taken on in the office 
of a country newspaper. He is pitifully incom- 
petent and has a habit of wandering away from 
his sixty-year-old wife, a "physician," widow of 
two predecessors, but genuinely fond of her feck- 
less husband, who is about half her age. At last 
the poor fellow dies, and out of respect for the 
widow's grief the town gives the deceased a good 
funeral, in which coffin, flowers, bearers, white 
gloves and all are donated. One of the pall- 
bearers failing — he was a lawyer who always 

69 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

promised to speak on public occasions and always 
failed to appear- — Sam Kelsey, the new mayor, 
was pressed into that service, and taking com- 
mand, the whole thing was carried to the last 
detail. "The casket was very heavy, and it was 
hard work getting it into the car, but finally this 
was accomplished, and the flowers placed on the 
casket. Then we stood around in solemn silence 
for a moment, before departing, and Sam Kelsey, 
with his hat still off, wiped a lot of perspiration 
from the top of his bald head, and leaning over to 
me, whispered in a tender, sympathetic way: 
'Who was her " For another example, take 
this, which I quote entire: "Ben Bradford, 
known to be a little gay, says the first time he 
kissed a woman other than his wife, he felt as 
sneaking as he did when he first began buying of 
Montgomery, Ward & Co. But Ben gradually 
became hardened, and many say he now trades 
with Sears-Roebuck, too." If any confirmed 
dweller in cities does not understand this, let 
him move to the country, and he will. 

In a very entertaining recent book, Mr. 
Edson's "Gentle Art of Columning, " it is main- 
tained, if I remember rightly, that all humor, as 
well as all wit, is referable to a kind of malice in 
us that delights in seeing the laugh on the other 
fellow. I have never liked this idea of humor, 
and with Mr. Edson's pardon will say that I do 

70 



THEOPHRASTUS IN KANSAS 

not believe It as to all humor. And I would cite 
both Mr. Howe's "Towns" as illustrations in 
point. There is no want of discernment in either 
of them, and many of their inhabitants are as 
hard, as wrong-headed and as absurd, well, as we 
are ourselves. The college-bred lawyer who 
came down in the world until his wife kept cows, 
of whom his rival said: "If he ever makes me 
mad, I'll just quit taking milk of him and starve 
him to death"; the daughter who would have the 
blinds down of nights although her sick old 
father wanted to look out at the stars; the 
slanderous wife who invented tales of her de- 
serted husband's wealth and niggardliness and 
ruined him — in none of these faithful little 
sketches of Mr. Howe is there malice or unchar- 
itableness. We need Mr. Howe's "Towns" as a 
corrective of the horrid "mortuaries" of Spoon 
River, It is one thing to detest the entire human 
race like Swift; it is another to laugh at men and 
women, and, what is still better, to laugh with 
them. Wit and humor, with their outriders — to 
the left, satire, lampoon and invective; to the 
right, pathos and tenderness — have always 
seemed to me more things in the nature of the 
spectrum, governed to the left with the light rays 
of the head, and to the right with the heat rays of 
the heart. Where they dissolve the one Into the 
other. It might be difficult often to say, but we 

71 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

know when we are warmed, and we are aware 
when only the flash Hght has been turned on. 

Mr. Masters once confessed, I beheve, that it 
was the Greek anthology which inspired " Spoon 
River" from the very irony of mortuary in- 
scription. I wonder if Mr. Howe knows old 
Theophrastus, with his "simple method, plain 
black and white, " with his language, " the simplest 
possible, neither bookish nor doctrinal nor con- 
troversial * * * He who relies for his effect 
on the simplicity of truth * * * and when you 
laugh, it is at humor in its last element of simple 
incongruity." This is recent learned criticism of 
Theophrastus, not the present reviewer's effort 
as to Mr. Howe. But 'twill serve. "How much 
one gets from a little talk, to be sure," says the 
"Loquacious Man " — Mr. Howe would have called 
him Jim Walker — "and his children say to him 
at bedtime: 'Papa, chatter to us, that we may 
fall asleep." This is Theophrastus, not Mr. 
Howe. "We haven't a daily paper in our town. " 
says Mr. Howe, not Theophrastus, "but really 
we don't greatly miss one, owing to Mr. Stevens, 
the milkman." And just one more: "Sandy 
McPherson, the barber, says he charges five 
dollars for shaving a dead man because he is 
compelled to throw away the razor he used. 
But how do we know he throws the razor away?" 



CARL SANDBURG— REBEL 

I HAVE tried to read Carl Sandburg's new bgok 
"Smoke and Steel," without predispositions 
and prejudices. I have tried to forget the laws 
and rules of the arts. I have put aside prosody 
as inapplicable, rhetoric as superfluous, grammar 
and the deft usages of cultivated speech as imper- 
tinent, and I hope that I have achieved an honest 
detachment. Some of us are born rebels. We 
are not content to walk in the steps of other men; 
we want our own ways, and it is our right. Some 
of us find in accepted art, as in accepted science, 
chains of the past; in the accepted usages of men, 
chains of the present. And we throw overboard 
likewise the accepted explanations of much in 
life, for example, and in religion, lest we forge 
chains once more for the future. The intellectual 
rebel, the rebel in art, is a fascinating figure 
wherever we meet him. Marlowe blaspheming, 
not high heaven, as we used to be taught, but 
the orthodoxy of his age, which is not the ortho- 
doxy of ours; Byron scandalously shocking Mrs. 
Grundy; Walt Whitman, glorious breaker of 
images, plaster, bisque, bronze and marble — these 
are some of the refreshing rebels of literature. 

The rebel may be a Prometheus and bring 
down the fire of heaven for the good of men and 
not merely upon his own devoted head; or the 

73 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

rebel may be only a naughty boy who won't wash 
his face and go to school. Do not jump at con- 
clusions, dear reader; I have not classified Mr. 
Sandburg yet, and I may not succeed when I try, 
I once knew a small would-be poetical rebel who 
showed his insubordination in the color of his 
socks and the gorgeousness of his neckties. He 
has posed now — and imposed — for a good many 
years, but I still call him a small rebel because, 
whatever may be the fact, he leaves with me an 
impression of insincerity, in which, if I wrong 
him, I am heartily sorry. One feels of him, 
as the congregation of Laurence Sterne is said 
to have felt, in doubt as to what he is likely to do 
next to surprise, if not to scandalize, in doubt 
except that it will be unclerical; his wig whipped 
off and thrown in your face or a pas de seul in 
the pulpit. 

Of one thing I am very certain as to Mr. 
Sandburg. He is very much in earnest, and I 
like him for that. Moreover, there is nothing 
weak or mawkish about him. He is also not out 
with a shotgun after his readers. His pieces — I 
am not ready to call them poems yet — have, too, 
much the air of being overheard rather than 
heard, and this is a great thing to be able to say, 
even of a poet. Now, when a man is without 
pose, in earnest and manly, you respect him, 
even although you may not admire his manners. 

74 



CARL SANDBURG— REBEL 

And In using this word I am sadly aware that I 
am introducing something trivial in the face of 
what Carlyle used to delight in calling the 
eternal Verities — the capitalized Verities. Mr. 
Sandburg is too virile to be insincere; he is so 
virile, indeed, that at times he is brutal. He 
seems one of those who, seeking for strength, find 
it best typified in a blow between the eyes; who, 
looking for truth, discover it in nakedness aware 
that it is nakedness; who, searching for an escape 
from affectation, find sincerity and integrity 
only in the conduct and the language of the slums 
and worse. For example, speaking of the ex- 
quisite musical composer, Grieg, Mr. Sandburg 
tells us: "Grieg being dead, we may speak of 
him and his art. Grieg being dead, we can talk 
about whether he was any good or not. Grieg 
being with Ibsen, Bjornson, Lief Ericson and the 
rest, Grieg being dead does not care a hell's hoot 
what we say. Morning, Spring, Anitra's Dance. 
He dreams them at the doors of new stars." 
This is the "poem" complete except for meas- 
ured printing. The concluding thought, though 
no original one, is a fine human sentiment. But 
why smash it with the incongruous brutality 
of a "hell's hoot".^ Norway, we are told at the 
moment, is much disturbed over a bit of Amer- 
ican desecration of this very music of "Peer 

75 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

Gynt" into ragtime. Is Mr. Sandburg's "hell's 
hoot" any better.? 

In every work of art, picture, piece of music 
or bit of writing there is obviously the idea and 
the execution of it. Some people think that it is 
in the perfect union of these two things that 
successful art consists. Mr. Sandburg is strong 
in the originality of the ironic and the grotesque. 
Take "The Alley Rats," whose jargon classifies 
whiskers as "lilacs, galways, feather dusters," 
and who are appropriately "croaked" one day 
at "a necktie party." Or the irony of the idea 
"they (that is, we) all want to play Hamlet"; 
the whimsicality of the query. "How does a 
hangman behave at home.?" or the daring 
thought of God as a crapshooter: "God is Luck 
and luck is God; we are all bones the High 
Thrower rolled; some are two spots, some double 
sixes." This is as grotesque and compelling as 
the dance of death itself. At times the irony, if 
lighter, is none the less admirable, as in "The 
Sins of Kalamazoo," which "are neither scarlet 
nor crimson," but "a convict gray, a dishwater 
drab"; or the manufactured wooden gods which 
answer prayers and make rain quite "as well as 
any little tin god. " If we ask ourselves honestly 
could these keen, bitter, odd, contorted ideas be 
better conveyed more musically, metrically or in 
a less bald and direct manner, the answer is 

76 



CARL SANDBURG— REBEL 

"no." Mr. Sandburg's manner suits his matter, 
even In Its colloquialism, Its slang. Its short un- 
musical phrase and scorn of the graces. 

However, Mr. Sandburg Is not without 
Imagery, most of It remarkably original, some of 
It remarkably fine — the river described as "the 
upper twist of a written question mark," "the 
white cauliflower faces of miners' wives" await- 
ing their husbands, purple martens "slinging 
ciphers" and "sliding figure eights" in their 
"sheaths of satin blue." But more commonly 
they are misshapen into something grotesque. 
A certain woman is "turned to a memorial of 
salt looking at the lights of a forgotten city"; 
two lovers are described as "chisel-pals"; the 
"East shakes a baby toe at tomorrow," and on 
the verge assuredly of incoherence: "There was 
a late autumn cricket and two smouldering moun- 
tain sunsets under the valley roads of her eyes. " 

By far the best poem — there I have called it a 
poem — of the volume is "Four Preludes on Play- 
things of the Wind, " a cumbrous title equivalent 
to All is Vanity. Here we have vivid Imagery: 
"The woman named Tomorrow," with "a hair- 
pin In her teeth, doing her hair"; the cedar gold- 
bound doors of "the greatest city that ever was" 
and "the golden girls" who sing its greatness. 
Then the wind and the rain and the crows, the 
rats and the lizards. It Is notable that much of 

77 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

the effect of this variation on a theme at 
least as old as Solomon is here produced by 
what Miss Amy Lowell is fond of dwelling on — 
as if there were anything that is new in the "new 
poetry" — to wit, as "the return," here almost a 
refrain. Some of the phrases almost fall into the 
regular cadence of that unhallowed thing, verse. 
Strange it is and most happy that genuine 
emotion often restores to the rebel and the theorist 
utterance which he has refused, as the presence of 
death may bring back the atheist to God. Mr. 
Sandburg is to be reckoned with. That he has 
justified the repudiation of the nine muses and 
the denial of all the graces is yet to be shown. 



ALFRED NOYES AND A GREAT 
POETIC TRADITION 

THIS is a third volume of the collected poetry 
of Mr. Noyes, assembling the work other- 
wise published since 191 3, together with "some 
new poems hitherto unpubHshed. " Introduction 
and acclaim are things long since passed, by Mr. 
Noyes. Secure in his acknowledged rank among 
those who are carrying on the great tradition of 
English poetry, it is only for the subaltern critic 
to salute him as he passes, one of the august 
group which leads. No more than just attained 
to middle life, Mr. Noyes has an enviable 
amount of achievement behind him from his first 
volume, "The Loom of Years, " published when 
he was but twenty- two years of age, to "The 
Elfin Artist" and this latest volume. Lyric, epic 
(as witnessed in the noble "Drake"), narrative, 
the poetry of nature and of dainty, fairy lore, 
sentiment, humor, feeling, all come naturally, 
facilely and effectively from his fertile pen. Not 
only does Mr. Noyes meet adequately and grace- 
fully every claim of the moment upon him for 
that expression of occasional sentiment on men 
and events which has always been recognized as 
one of the anticipated functions of the accepted 
popular British poet, but he does these difficult 
things, as if there were nothing in the world easier 

79 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

to do, and he does them, successfully voicing 
ideas, feelings and sentiments in which all can 
concur. Not the least pleasing and interesting is 
it that the Sussex poet who surprised Clayton 
Hamilton, now a good many years ago, by the 
confession that he had not been abroad, not even 
to France, which lay almost in view, should since 
have come to us, and, in the relations which he 
has established at Princeton and the many ties 
and friendships which are now his with America, 
should have drawn closer those bonds of amity 
and brotherhood which bind the two great 
Anglo-Saxon peoples in one. 

Language is a stronger tie than treaties; and a 
common literature more enduring than cement. 
Wells, Galsworthy, Bennett, Barrie, Masefield, 
Noyes — these are contemporary names, with 
many more as well known among us as in Lon- 
don. A decade almost before the war the late 
Hamilton Mabie introduced us to an American 
reprint of poems by Mr. Noyes, since when the 
poet has become an international figure, express- 
ing again and again in form of beauty those 
larger and more universal truths which mark the 
acquiescence and unity of two great nations. 
To the carping ignorant who affirm from time to 
time with a Philistine leer that poetry is dead, 
there is no better answer than the sale in many 

80 



ALFRED NOYES AND A GREAT TRADITION 

editions of the poetry of men such as Mr. Mase- 
field and Mr. Noyes. I recall how a few years 
ago, when the former was advertised to read his 
poetry in the halls of an Eastern University, 
the concourse of those who came to hear him was 
so great that adjournment was made to a neigh- 
boring church, which itself could scarcely hold 
the crowd. Mr. Noyes has upon more than one 
occasion experienced a similar welcome and held 
his audience with the sheer force of powerful 
verse and the charm of a personality which ex- 
plains at once his grace, his forthrightness and 
the significance of his popular appeal. 

I have written above of Mr. Noyes as one of 
those favored poets, who is acclaimed by his 
contemporaries as worthy to carry on the great 
tradition of English poetry. In that mighty line 
walked Chaucer and Spenser, each in his day, 
the spokesman of his time in its acceptance, its 
aspirations and its hopes, glorified as a herald 
is decked out in brave uniform, but none the less 
a true voice of his time. In that august line 
came Dryden and even Milton, rebel in part 
though he was, and later Pope, and, in his time, 
Wordsworth and Tennyson, and, in our America, 
Longfellow, to mention no more. Of course, 
there have been many lesser men who, each in 
his way, has helped to carry on the poetry of the 

8i 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

centre, if I may so call it, the poetry which is 
essentially the expression of the spirit of its own 
age without being in any wise impaired in the 
sincerity with which it expresses likewise the 
man who writes it. If I may venture on a trite 
old figure, this great stream of literature, which 
has come down to us from the runnels and trick- 
lings of early ages, bears much stately and 
accepted commerce on its steady current, much 
that floats securely amid stream. Poets who are 
in the great tradition of English letters escape 
the rapids of the rebels, the shallows of ineptitude, 
the backwaters of imitation, and the bogs and 
morasses of eccentricity, where nothing floats. 
To leave figures, such are in the line of an 
orderly evolution, they are not freaks; they do 
not startle, surprise or scandalize; as Taine said 
of Tennyson, "They will pervert nobody." 
They are safe and orthodox, each with an ortho- 
doxy of his time which, we should be careful to 
remember, is not the orthodoxy necessarily of all 
time. I cannot feel that it is the function of art 
at all times to stun and amaze. The certainty 
and restfulness of Jane Austen is worth all the 
novels of terror of her age baled into one huge 
packet. And it comes almost as a balm and an 
alleviation in these days of topsy-turvydom to 
read a poet who believes unaffectedly in God and 

82 



ALFRED NOYES AND A GREAT TRADITION 

finds it unnecessary to punctuate that belief 
with a big base drum. 

With all Mr. Noyes' felicity and variety of 
theme, his adequacy, the saneness and justice of 
his attitude toward life and the elevated quaHty 
of his sentiments, scarcely anything is more 
striking than the technical excellence of his art. 
In this day of jazz music, future perfectist art 
and spineless verse, it is a boon to have this 
skilful and consummate vindicator in practice 
of the time-honored graces and beauties of 
poetry which Mr. Noyes insists on treating as an 
art in words. Like every true artist, he 
has extended tradition while observing it, 
and he fully deserves all the praise that he has 
received for his originality and inventiveness in 
new stanzas, his novel experiments (such as 
rhymes on the first word, single word refrains 
and the like), and a frequently novel and clever 
use of repetition and refrain. Above all this 
consummate metrist has preserved the melody of 
our beautiful English tongue, giving it again and 
again new effects and charmingly novel cadences. 
If it is pleasant to turn from the cacophony of 
much of our free verse and other to the music of 
Mr. Noyes, it is no less a delight to come out of 
the gloom, the black significance and enigmatic 
depths of some of our contemporary poets into 

83 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

the sunshine which illumes the sparkHng world of 
Mr. Noyes' wholesome fancy. Come, let us put 
our questionings away and believe that there are 
fairies in the forests and the glades of old Eng- 
land at the least, that there are things of beauty 
in this world of ours and that God is not remote 
in his heavens, sitting austere, but is manifest 
in joy and goodness in the hearts of men. 



MR. MASEFIELD AND THE 
KEY POETIC. 

IT is said that everybody — that is everybody 
who cares about things of the mind — carries 
about with him somewhere, Hke a bunch of keys, 
certain definitions which he uses, as occasion 
may offer, to unlock the avenues of thought or 
discourse. Sometimes these keys are remarkably 
hard and definite, good each for one little door 
and for nothing else; sometimes they are fewer in 
number, adjustable in various locks, assuming at 
last, in the truly cultivated and liberalized, the 
qualities of a master key which can open all 
locks. To vary the figure, he who does not hold 
many of his definitions — even of very familiar 
things — in solution, under advisement, ready to 
be adapted to growth in the world and in him- 
self, will soon be without a key to unlock any- 
thing. There was a time within the memory of 
those still alive when there were grave doubts in 
the minds of rnany as to whether Browning was 
writing poetry or something for which a new 
name must be found, or whether the Wagnerian 
"cacophony," as some called it, was really music 
and not something else. And yet how far have 
we passed beyond all this in de-versified poetry, 
demelodized music and denicotined cigars, to 
carry our denials no further. 

85 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

But It Is not along this line that the poetry of 
Mr. Masefield gives us pause; for no Keats was 
ever more enthralled to beauty than Is Mr. Mase- 
field, and the music of verse, with all the old de- 
vices, often astonishingly and daringly developed, 
Is to him as the apple of his eye. But there Is 
something more. It Is possible to love beauty 
selectively and, trusting the eye, choose only that 
which Is pleasing In theme and agreeable to 
dwell on. Mr. Masefield Is a far more significant 
artist than this In his facing of the realities. In his 
acceptance of a subject In Its difficulties to dis- 
cover the deeper, the more significant beauty 
which It Is the function of the true artist to reveal. 
The man who has written of the brutal realities of 
the forecastle and the prize fight — as Mr. Mase- 
field has written In "Dauber" and In "The Ever- 
lasting Mercy"; of sensuality and murder Itself, 
as In "The Widow of the Bye Street" — Is no 
effeminate devotee of mere beauty. But be it 
noticed that Mr. Masefield's method In all his 
realism Is that of an artist keenly alive not only 
to the obvious outward truth of line and contour, 
but to that Inner truth of the spirit which Is 
worth all the small arts of taste and prettlness 
rolled Into one. 

I recall a pleasantly disputatious friend who 
carried about with him a portentous bunch of 
the keys of definition and jingled them Inces- 

86 



MR. MASEFIELD AND THE KEY POETIC 

santly. He was always getting down to brass 
tacks and he usually stayed there. One day the 
argument recurred to "Well now what, after all, 
is poetry?" and a famous old poem on Winter 
became the subject of illustration. In that poem, 
which contains that "coughing," it will be re- 
membered, which "drowned the parson's saw," 
the refrain runs: "While greasy Joan doth keel 
the pot," an idea, homely, familiar and, as the 
older critics would have said, "low," My friend 
was willing to accept the word "keel" as archaic 
and, being out of use, therefore strange enough 
to be poetic. He objected to "greasy" as des- 
criptive enough, but unpoetical, and agreed 
with the old critics that "pot" was simply "low.' 
Another line of the famous old poem really 
incensed him. It runs: "And Marian's nose 
looks red and raw. " Was Marian remarkable in 
this? No. Was it not vividly descriptive? Yes. 
But then the subject was so unpoetical. Winter, 
unpoetical! Obviously the poetic key of my 
friend of the brass tacks would not unlock much. 
We have yet to learn with any degree of con- 
viction that beauty is not art unless that beauty 
be significant; that mere significance is not art 
unless that significance be raised by a recog- 
nition of its inherent beauty and harmony into the 
region of art, A multiplication table is significant, 
very significant; and so, alas! is an account book. 

87 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

Now, Mr. Maseiield is one of those rare poets 
who estabHshes in the best of his work an equiH- 
brium, so to speak, between the significance of 
reaHty and that ideahty which is the essence of 
beauty. There are passages in "Dauber," for 
example, the wretched anemic lad before the 
mast, enamored of color, in the supreme mo- 
ment, a hero — there are passages as imaginative 
as "The Lay of the Ancient Mariner" and as 
realistic as Jack London; and the impression is 
that of poetry, not because, as in the former, we 
trespass into the supernatural, but because 
of realization of the realities in terms of the 
beautiful. 

"Right Royal" is the story of a steeplechase. 
This is nothing very new. The Greek poet Pindar 
established an immortal reputation on the 
commemoration of athletic events. But "Right 
Royal" is a narrative of a singularly compelling 
nature. I did not want to leave it until the van- 
ning post was passed. The go, the whirl the 
picturesqueness of it all is delightful and the 
effect, with all its detail of the small actualities, 
could not have been achieved save by the lifting 
power of poetry. I cannot think of it in free 
verse, for example. For where would be the 
rhythm that beats with the clatter of hoofs in 
which, be it remarked, there is a certain regu- 
larity in life if ever a race is won? The picture 

88 



MR. MASEFIELD AND THE KEY POETIC 

of the concourse and crowd, of the stables, the 
stablemen, the costermongers, the "bookies," 
even the negro minstrels and sellers of oranges, 
is vividly successful and daring. And here let 
me break a lance in a small matter with some of 
the critics who object to Mr. Masefield's au- 
dacious rhymes, some of them mere assonance, 
like "disposes — knows his," or "offense — ^Testa- 
ments." What matters it if a veritably artistic 
effect is produced and not destroyed by these 
risque feats of daring.^ There is nothing unper- 
missible in art, which, like rebellion, is to be 
judged alone by its success. Of course, if you do 
not succeed you richly deserve hanging and 
usually get it. No one who has heard Mr. Mase- 
field tell one of his delightful tales of extravagant 
humor and ingenuity could raise the question as 
to whether these feats on the border of the 
grotesque are conscious or not. 

"Enslaved and Other Poems," contains 
many fine things. I like "The Lemmings," who 
come "westward over the snow" seeking food 
and "some calm place 

Where one could taste God's quiet and be fond 
With the little beauty of a human face. 
But now the land is drowned, yet still we press 
Westward, in search, to death, to nothingness. 

But the masterpiece of these two volumes is the 
tremendous ballad of the supernatural, "The 

89 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

Hounds of Hell," tuneful, grotesque, powerful, 
with the vigor of reality with all its diablerie of 
the supernatural. It is not to be spoiled by 
blabbing as to what it is about; for, like all art 
that is really worth while, it can be conveyed in 
no wise except its own and defies description, 
epitome or any other short cut to an inferior 
understanding. 



AN OLD MYTH REVITALIZED. 

" A ND what are you painting now?" said 
JTjl Mr. Bounder to his friend, the artist. 

"A portrait of Cleopatra was the reply." 

"A portrait of Cleopatra.^ Why I thought 
that that old girl had had her picture taken long 
ago." 

"Oh yes, she was taken and retaken often 
enough in life; and you may take this remark in 
any way you like, but " 

Here the artist broke down. What is the use 
of trying to explain to a Bounder the immortality 
of a great subject.^ How can you get him to see 
the diiference between "getting through" with 
fractions, both vulgar and proper, once and for 
all, and the circumstance that one never "gets 
through" with Beethoven or the great poets 
whose works, being art and not knowledge, are 
permanent, things to live in, not like the sciences, 
be they great or little, things to pass through. 
Wherefore to Mr. Bounder the title of Mr. 
Robinson's book will be a sufficient deterrent; for 
what have Bounders to do with Lancelots or 
Camelots? Their business is with corner lots 
and job lots. 

Among the inheritances of this undeserving 
race of ours it may well be questioned if there is 
any one so precious as myths, those stories of old 

91 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

time which come down the ages, gathering on the 
way, new artistic beauty in variable form and a 
novel and deeper significance. The power to con- 
struct myths is the measure of a people's men- 
tality; for the myth, in religion, tradition and 
song, is the veritable expression of the race, the 
voice of the folk. Inferior peoples are mythically 
voiceless, or, when they speak, give us crudity. 
Great peoples have always been vocal in their 
myths, about which the least important thing is 
the actual facts out of which they have grown. 
Take the splendid myth of the magnificence of 
Solomon, king of kings. The actualities tell us 
that he was the chief of a small principality 
forming the corridor connecting two great em- 
pires, to one at least of which he paid tribute; 
and as to the marvellous temple of Solomon, it 
appears to have covered a city lot of some lOO 
feet by 50 at the most. We shall not inquire into 
the wisdom of him who took unto himself so 
many wives. But the myth of Solomon, the 
wise and magnificent, is a tribute to the patriot- 
ism, the imaginative power and poetic ideals of 
the Hebrew race. The glory of the wisdom of 
Solomon, like the splendor of his temple, has 
blazed down through the ages; it typifies for us 
the ancient Hebrew people, not in their paltry 
actualities, but in their ideals and aspirations. 
So the heroic age of Greece is the " Iliad, " not the 

92 



AN OLD MYTH REVITALIZED 

"history" of the petty squabbles of a few small 
chieftains over a stolen woman; and the bar- 
barity, superstition and sordidness of the middle 
ages as poverty-stricken historians are con- 
strained by "facts" to reconstruct them, rise up 
into beauty and pathos and immortality in 
the "Mort D'Arthur" and the "Chanson de 
Roland." 

Another thing about the myth is that it is 
never outworn; but told and retold is adaptable 
to all time. Take just this old story of Lancelot, 
told once more so beautifully, so directly, so 
novelly, by this American poet. Like all true 
myths, it is of imperishable material, and as such 
may be sung from Geoffrey of Monmouth and 
Wace to Tennyson, William Morris and Swin- 
burne, and now again by Mr. Robinson, and yet 
ever be new. The power of this great romance of 
chivalry to inspire the poets is amazing the more 
so as it inspires them in so many different ways. 
The intricate patterning of Spenser with its 
underlying allegory; the refined, somewhat color- 
less but beautiful, sentimentalizing of Tennyson; 
the pre-Raphaelite color and sensuousness, not 
always intellectually sustained; the robust her- 
oic-barbaric, Christian-heathen mysticism of 
Wagnerian saga — all these things are the inspir- 
ation of the mythology of chivalry which centres 
in King Arthur. The poets have always been 

93 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

attracted to the subject. "For a heroic poem," 
said old Ben Jonson, "there is no such ground as 
King Arthur's fiction," And Milton only gave 
up this topic for "Paradise Lost" after a long 
entertainment of it. 

Mr. Robinson's "Lancelot" is a compara- 
tively brief narrative, or perhaps better, a semi- 
dramatic poem; for most of the story is unfolded 
in dialogue of a peculiarly direct and limpid dic- 
tion, howsoever the thought is at times deep, if 
not subtle. A swift and remarkably mono- 
syllabic blank verse, of great freedom in phrasing 
but absolutely metrical, is the fitting medium for 
this rapid and living discourse. The story deals 
with the belated discovery, almost forced upon 
him, by King Arthur of the relations of Lancelot 
and Guinevere, the queen; her rescue from burn- 
ing at the stake for her unchastity by Lancelot, 
in accomplishing which he is driven, though un- 
knowing, to kill two brothers of his friend, 
Cawaine. The story concludes with the last meet- 
ing of the lovers in the monastery at Glastonbury 
with Lancelot's renunciation and departure into 
the night in search of the Light. But these events 
are not Mr. Robinson's theme, which is not re- 
duceable thus to its elemental "facts." The 
interplay of human emotion in beings, swept 
hither and thither by passions and happenings, 
alternately controlled and uncontrolled, in a 

94 



AN OLD MYTH REVITALIZED 

world predestined, but to what extent we know 
not — this is Mr. Robinson's theme, and with it is 
developed the innate nobility of man, however 
weak and the sport of time. Lancelot is a finely- 
conceived creation, strong, individual, magnani- 
mous, yet human. 

I have no objection to allegorical poetry, if 
you do not attempt to interpret the allegory. 
Indeed, allegory is best left to the kind of people 
who like that sort of thing. To me even logar- 
ithms are preferable. For which reason it is a 
disappointment, to me at least, to learn that, 
more or less goaded to it, Tennyson once owned 
the soft impeachment that "The Idyls of the 
King" were an extended allegory of human life. 
But significance is one thing, allegory quite 
another. The real objection to allegory is that it 
is significance frozen into a rigidity of application 
that defeats artistic purpose. Mr. Robinson's 
poem is profoundly significant of the great 
tragedy of our time; his Lancelot rises almost to 
the typification of our human race, weak, sinful, 
passionate, but noble at heart and large in spirit. 
In this noble poem, poetry is performing its true 
function in fashioning one of the great myths of 
all time into a significance in the present, and in 
conveying that significance in the terms of artistic 
beauty, the poet adds another link in the flashing 
and perdurable chain of an imperishable story. 



THE POETRY OF 
GEORGE E. WOODBERRY. 

THIS small volume contains, besides the 
longer poem which gives it title and takes 
up considerably more than half of its pages, a 
sequence of some forty sonnets, "Ideal Passion," 
already published, some "poems of the great 
war, " largely likewise in sonnet form, and a few 
additional sonnets and lyrics on other themes. 
It marks the continuance of the career of Mr. 
Woodberry as a poet of high attainment and 
assured reputation, for in this book is sustained 
his power of picture, his beautiful elevation of 
thought and his delicate and exquisite diction. 

The poems of the great war, to take them 
first, are full of patriotism, of high resolve and of 
touching compassion and pity for the fallen. 
They are the work of an American whose heart 
beats true and whose eyes are on the great es- 
sentials. And they are remarkably free from the 
saeva indignatio which stirs lesser natures in the 
contemplation of this seismic fault and slip-back 
of mankind into the barbarism out of which we 
were emerging. And yet these poems on the 
war are disappointing, I know not just why. 
Read, as I read them the other night, beside the 
fierce, bitter actualities of Wilford Owens, 
strummed out though these are with bare 

96 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 

knuckles on a naked board, Mr. Woodberry's 
flutelike notes of Idealist sentiment seem thin 
and, dare I say it, almost irrelevant. Mr. Wood- 
berry has a pure and holy passion for Italy which 
has echoed down the ages from Byron, the 
Brownings, Swinburne and the rest. I will not 
say that these poems seem literary — they are 
too sincere, too veritable, for that — however, 
they reverberate with an old song. I will rather 
salute all enthusiasm for Italy, despite Fiume 
and the madness of the poet who has re- 
cently been attitudinizing there, for I, too, love 
Italy in spite of all her chauvinism, sordidness 
and irrationality. 

To say that Mr. Woodberry is a master son- 
neteer is to utter the mere truth. The sequence, 
"Ideal Passion," is, in this respect, almost a 
piece of virtuosity, for the poet is not only punc- 
tilious in the niceties of the sonnet form, he is 
strikingly original at times in its management 
and successful in maintaining throughout a tech- 
nique fitting to sustain his elevated thought. I 
particularly admire his choice of the difficult 
alternative scheme on two rhymes for the sestet 
and his management of it is often exceedingly 
skilful. There is a large phrasing, too, in these 
sonnets which rids one completely of the feeling 
— only too common as to poetry in this form — 
that it is a species of mosaic or dove-tail work in 

97 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

which patience and ingenuity are the chief es- 
sentials. Mr. Woodberry's subject is here, as 
often elsewhere, that high sustaining love which 
rises above all sense of self and sex to become the 
guiding ideal, unmatchable and unattainable, 
yet ever-begetting effort, devotion and efface- 
ment of self. Esoteric } Yes, my dear Philistine, 
a cult, a worship in a temple reared not by hands 
such as yours. 

We are told that "The Roamer" is "a nar- 
rative of the soul's progress which may be con- 
sidered as in small compass summarizing the re- 
ligious, social and esthetic ideals of our own age. " 
I am sure that I should not have ventured to 
have designated this remarkable platonic flight 
into the higher regions of poetry and philosophy 
by a designation smacking even so little of the 
mundane. Mr. Woodberry has achieved almost 
a complete spiritual detachment in this poem. 
There is only one thing about it which I do not 
like, and that is the title. It sounds, to speak 
profanely, so much like a kind of automobile or 
bicycle; and one thinks of "The Excursion," 
especially when we notice the vehicle — so to 
speak — which is blank verse, by which we are to 
be conveyed. But Wordsworth is not the man; 
be it said with all respect; Mr. Woodberry has lit 
his torch at the altar of Shelley, the very flame, 
of "Alastor" burns in it, and that beautiful and 

98 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 

steady flame is, as Shelley's, a beacon in the 
night, radiant with light, howsoever the lowly in 
poetry may not warm their hands by it. 

I should want three or four times this space 
to do even partial justice to the exceeding beauty 
and the inspiring ideals of this lovely poem. It is 
said to have been written during a period of years 
but barring the deeper insight of the later books 
it is, for a poem of this kind, of a remarkable 
unity and of an equally remarkably sustained 
excellence. As with Shelley, we dwell here in the 
wild waste spaces, among scenes of unsurpassable 
beauty, usually seen in the large, with sweep of 
mountain, plain and sky, and our thoughts, 
under guidance of the poet, are of the beatitudes, 
the sublimities of vision into those creations of 
insight and the poetic imagination which men 
call unrealities, but which are, when all is said, 
the only real things in "this slipper world." But 
the prose of comment has not the power of levi- 
tation which the reader may find for himself in 
this noble descant on the aspiring soul of man. 
Better within reach is a recognition of the musi- 
cal cadence of Mr. Woodberry's swift, varied 
and competent verse. I found music and fluidity 
in the unusually monosyllabic blank verse of Mr. 
Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Lancelot." Mr. 
Woodberry very contrastedly is rich in poly- 
syllabic pomp and rapidity — 

99 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

Millions of men innumerably spread, 
Faces along the illimitable wave. 

And his phrases sweep in long cadences that re- 
call the Miltonic roll, albeit not the fuller Mil- 
tonic resonance. I will not say above all, but 
high among his many poetical gifts, is Mr. Wood- 
berry's power of scenic description. Only a lover 
of the hills and the solitudes can so write; but 
over the allurements of the poet's art — and here 
we may well say, above all — is his lofty, his aus- 
tere ideality, which finds the loss of self — as com- 
plete as that of the Buddha or the Christ — alone 
the fulfilment of a perfect love. 



AS TO AMERICAN DRAMA 

AMERICAN drama!" and we hold up our 
. hands in protest and begin to talk of com- 
mercialism and theatrical trusts. Or we start 
down the deadly lane of parallels and glow in 
comparative praises of the drama in France, in 
Germany, in Russia, anywhere. Or we inaugu- 
rate movements, following the English afar off 
in pageantry or civic plays. Or, if we do none of 
these things, at least we start a society providing 
qualified tasters who visit the theatres from time 
to time and, over a late supper, decide by vote 
what we should like and what we should adver- 
tise by our disapproval. Professor George P. 
Baker, of Harvard, did something quite different 
from all this, it is now a goodly number of years 
ago. He started his "47 Workshop "in a quiet 
and industrious endeavor to foster our drama, so 
far as such a thing as drama can be fostered, by 
precept and collegiate guidance, and he has long 
since justified his experiment in the turning out 
of several playwrights whose work is alike a 
credit to dramatic craftsmanship and a practical 
and accepted success upon the stage. Under 
these circumstances Professor Baker is pecu- 
liarly the man to collect, for the general reader, a 
group of American plays which shall stand as 
representative of our drama in its present state 

lOI 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

of development. This he has done in a volume 
with the title of "Modern American Plays," pre- 
fixing to the text an all too brief introduction on 
the plays selected and the reasons for their 
selection. 

Success on the stage is Professor Baker's first 
criterion of selection, and his second is variety. 
The opening play of the volume is "As a Man 
Thinks," by Augustus Thomas, a comedy of 
contemporary life, which touches on prevalent 
feminism, lightly but surely, with not quite the 
glib solution which is on the lip of the current 
feminist. In its essence this play is didactic, 
"a tendenz-drama, " however deftly concealed 
in the skilful workmanship of one long tried and 
approved. The adaptable Mr. Belasco's "Re- 
turn of Peter Grim" likewise touches on a topic 
of the hour, interest in that beyond and hereafter 
from the bourne of which we are not quite cer- 
tain whether the traveller can really return. But 
Mr. Belasco cleverly leaves the matter less 
proved than suggested. Mr. Anspacher's "The 
Unchastened Woman" is notable in that it con- 
trives to interest us in an uninteresting and 
unsympathetic heroine and to leave us at the end 
with things continuing and unadjusted very 
much as they carry on in life. Mr. Sheldon's 
"Romance," by far, one should think, the ablest 
play of the volume, contains the element of its 

I02 



AS TO AMERICAN DRAMA 

existence in its title and realizes at least one 
character of a holding personality. And Mr. 
Massey's " Plots and Playwrights" is satire of 
plays in a play, a time-honored species, old when 
Dryden was ridiculed in "The Rehearsal" and 
older still by the time that Sheridan plagiarized 
that satire in his "Critic." 

Playmaking in the English language has been 
variously presided over in different times. To 
avoid rising out of our topic into the region of the 
divinities, Dryden, greatest of English satirists, 
ablest of general poets of his time, theorist and 
translator, was once the foremost playwright. 
At a subsequent time that post was occupied by 
Nicholas Rowe, poet laureate, who "followed 
Shakespeare," but a long way off; at still 
another by equally forgotten Sheridan Knowles, 
whose most veritable dramatic asset was 
his borrowed surname. Later times bring us 
triumvirates and oligarchs in the annals of the 
drama and we become bewildered among the 
Barries and the Shaws, the Pineros and 
the Joneses of times which are now, or were 
not very long ago. In America we may be a 
little less distraught, howsoever there are pre- 
cious few of us who have not written, are writing 
or planning to write at the very least a farce or a 
pageant. But it would seem that it is not long 
since that our master playwright was the late 

103 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

Clyde Fitch, and who shall deny that we are still 
under the benign and versatile sway of Mr. 
Belasco? Now, of such an art we must at least, 
confess that it has had its ups and downs, and 
that the amplitude of its vibrations, to put it in 
another way, has made various noises in the 
world whereof some have been high and others 
not so high. Nor can we expect it to be otherwise. 
The drama is, by the most honored of all figures, 
the mirror of human nature, however we leave 
that mirror at times to tarnish in neglect, how- 
ever we may cover up a part of it or refuse to 
accept as veritable the images which it reflects. 
All the movies in Christendom, and in Heathen- 
dom besides, cannot kill the essential drama in 
us. The musical comedies have made a good try 
at it, as did the old heroic play in its time and 
melodrama and opera since. But the essential 
drama will abide when all these "sports" and 
offshoots are remembered only by the historians. 
In reading Professor Baker's representatives 
of the accepted American drama of today, two or 
three things occur to the — let us hope — none- 
too-biased reader. Let us be frank about it; all 
of these plays read more or less baldly, at least as 
compared with much other former drama, also 
accepted for the stage, both English and foreign. 
Professor Baker is right when he says that 
"drama is a collaborative art," one in which the 

104 



AS TO AMERICAN DRAMA 

author, the actor (and all who help his imperso- 
nation) and besides, the spectator as well, co- 
operate to a cumulative result. But I rather 
suspect that these modern plays of ours depend 
somewhat more on this cooperation, somewhat 
more on the actor and on the setting than did 
many of the plays which have gone before. They 
are at the mercy of their presentation because 
they are wanting in distinction of manner and of 
style; because their dialogue is so close a replica 
of our daily speech; because their personages are 
so obviously like everybody or anybody whom 
you or I are likely to meet. And now we arouse 
our "realist" friends, those who object to blank 
verse because they do not employ it habitually 
in discussions with Margery, those who resent 
soliloquy and the aside — like Mr. Shaw — because 
they do not happen in what they call "real life" 
and the like. But, my dear "realist," the stage 
is not the world and, even if Shakespeare did say 
it, not all of the world's a stage. 

Neither distinction of manner nor distinction 
in the subtle thing which we call style is wanting 
in actual life, even in actual American life. But 
to catch it — or anything else for that matter — 
for the stage, you must translate it out of the 
language of life — that is the manner in which it is 
presented to our senses in life — into the language 
of the stage. And you cannot make the lan- 

105 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

guage of the drama more realistic by forgetting 
its essential basis in art. These plays, excellent as 
they are and fully deserving of their success, 
seem to one who knows somewhat of a wider 
dramatic literature, flat in perspective, wanting in 
color, unindivldualized in a measure as to their 
personages and unidiomatic, theatrically speak- 
ing, notwithstanding their undoubted mastery of 
that technique of the stage of which Professor 
Baker has happily made so much in his 
"workshop." 

It is not altogether vision that we lack or 
poetry even. But we seem in these latter days 
to be a little afraid of seeing things — or at least of 
putting down what we see; while poetry stam- 
pedes us with terror into an effort to get as far 
away from it as possible. Are we getting to be 
as afraid of our emotions in art as of a display of 
our feelings in religion.? Shall we arrive shortly 
at a point in which the gentleman will not only 
discuss neither politics or religion, but will recog- 
nize that any show of emotion for art or any- 
thing else is taboo.? Wit, humor, sentiment, ro- 
mance are as common in every-day life as they 
were when the old dramatist used them. There 
is scarcely a sparkle in the dialogue of any of 
these five representative plays and Professor 
Baker surprises us when he tells us of the success 
of the only bit of pathos in them all — and that 

1 06 



AS TO AMERICAN DRAMA 

ironical — which occurs in the extravaganza, 
*' Plays and Playwrights." With all our chatter 
about the freedom of the arts, our stage seems 
conventionalized all but to the point of stag- 
nation. What a cad is the stock husband whose 
"past" is accepted as an essential part of any 
husband and played off against the wife's present 
or attempted future ^ And how delicately the neat 
distinctions of a double code of morals are drawn! 
And the heroines! Mr. Massey is right, there is 
more real drama in the rooms of a New York 
lodging house than in all the theatres of the Great 
White Way. Why not get some of the poetry, 
the color, the aroma of actual life onto the stage 
by an honest translation of all these things into 
dramatic terms in place of all this pussyfooting 
repetition of mere actualities.^ 



MR. DRINKWATER'S " MARY STUART " 

IT is related that Sir Walter Scott once refused 
to write a biography of Mary Stuart because 
he feared that the fascination of that wonderful 
woman and his own Jacobite leanings might re- 
sult in a falsification of history. The spell of the 
Scottish queen is abiding and everlasting. I re- 
call being delayed once at a small inn in the upper 
Rhone valley, on one of those days of exhausting 
heat and dust which visit that long gully in the 
mountains. It was too glaring to go out at mid- 
day and there was nothing to do but seek some 
entertainment within. I found a little book on 
"Mary Stuart, Queen and Martyr," by an ex- 
cellent French abbe, and obtained a new angle on 
the subject. "A queen, young, beautiful, un- 
fortunate and of the true faith. " Surely here is 
enough for the exercise of that by no means the 
least creditable process of human activity, the 
weaving of myths. The good abbe had written 
quite an eloquent book; however, the evidence 
adverse to his thesis little troubled him. There 
is, of course, history, and there is fiction, and we 
must confess that there are times when the in- 
sight of the poet surpasses, in reading the truth, 
the more rational processes of the historian. 
"Mary Stuart, a History," may well designate a 
work. Perhaps Mr. Drinkwater is wise in calling 

1 08 



MR. DRINKWATER'S "MARY STUART" 

his "Mary Stuart" "a play." But the 
poet's insight is in it, and, when all has been 
said, the Queen of Scots remains one of the 
enigmas of history. 

Mr. Drinkwater's drama opens with two men, 
an older and a much younger, conversing in an 
Edinburgh room of about " 1900 or later. " The 
younger has brought his trouble to his wiser 
friend, not so much for advice as to talk about it, 
after the manner of some natures. His adorable 
young wife, Margaret, has formed another attach- 
ment and has told him frankly and honestly. 
Neither has been untrue nor unloving; he has 
proved merely insufficient. But, of course, the 
young husband cannot admit this, or even so 
much as see it. "If she live finely," says the 
elder man, "she will take her love from no man 
unless he is unworthy." The young husband 
declares that he will share his love with no one, 
and the answer comes: "Boy, will you not share 
the sun of heaven, the beauty of the world .^" 
Is Margaret, the young wife, "to have no better 
luck than that poor queen .^" And he turns to a 
portrait of Mary Stuart which hangs over the 
mantelpiece, reading some verses inscribed be- 
neath it, the last stanza of which runs: 

Not Riccio nor Darnley knew 

Nor Bothwell how to find 
This Mary's best magnificence 

Of the great lover's mind. 
109 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

And now there is the rustle of a dress on the 
terrace without, and there stands the queen with 
these words on her mouth: "Boy, I can tell you 
everything." And immediately we are back in 
March, 1566, in Mary Stuart's room in Holyrood 
castle, that ill-lighted, litttle stone-begirt closet, 
the actual sight of which is such a shock to such 
as have accepted the canvases of "historical" 
painters. Now the dramatist unfolds to us sim- 
ply, directly, without a superfluous word, his 
story of the matters preceding the murder of 
Riccio. Fascinating, imperious, a queen and, 
therefore, accountable to none in her right to be 
loved as in the prerogatives of her royalty, Mary 
recognizes with the fatal certainty of a second 
sight that failure is to be hers because of the in- 
sufficiency of any of those who love her to fill the 
void of her nature with a great passion. Riccio 
is a mere phrase maker and courtier in the con- 
ventionalities of courtship. His nature is too 
shallow to stir to a deep devotion and a large 
sacrifice. The queen scarcely interposes between 
him and his fate and laments, when he has been 
cruelly murdered on her very door sill, that he 
might not have been a nobler cause for her great 
quarrel and requital. Darnley, the king and her 
husband, is merely contemptible with his ribald 
songs and his petty jealousies. Even Bothwell, 

no 



MR. DRINKWATER'S "MARY STUART" 

who is at least direct and possessed of a certain 
bravado of masterfulness, cannot take the 
queen's whole heart, who, like Cleopatra, would 
have a lover wholly, heroically hers; a lover who 
could feel the world well lost in the fierce joy of 
possessing her, who could dare all and lose all for 
her sake. And Mary, one of the grandest of les 
grandes amoreuses in all history, plunged madly 
into intrigue, crime, imprisonment, death on the 
scaffold, because there was none among the men 
who loved her who could hold out to her the 
strong hand which she needed and feed the hun- 
ger, the craving, "the magnificence of the great 
lover's mind." 

Mr. Drinkwater's play dramatizes no more 
than the Riccio incident, and its power is in the 
disclosure of character through the clash and 
personality of his personages; which is the same 
thing as saying that his power is a veritably 
dramatic one. I have not had the pleasure of 
seeing this play on the stage. If we did not know 
it already, its success might be predicted from its 
very economy of stroke. And, indeed, this is a 
feature which will strike any careful reader, as 
likewise the circumstance that the form is prose. 
It is also noticeable that except for one little 
touch as to the advice of one "Hugo Dubois," 
who "in an elaborate treatise on the coiffure" 

III 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

advises "azure or lazuline gems" for the hair of 
women of fair complexion, there is scarcely a 
touch of what might be called local coloring or 
historical atmosphere in the whole play. Pos- 
sibly this is the more justifiable in that Mary's 
story is after all here universalized to be appli- 
cable to all time. Most effective is the con- 
cluding touch. Poor Riccio has fallen; Darnley, 
"the king," who weakly pretends ignorance as to 
what he has procured, has departed from the 
queen's presence and Bothwell sends Mary 
Beaton to know if he can be admitted, to which 
the queen replies: "Not to-night, Beaton." And 
once more the song recurs on her lips : 

Not Riccio nor Darnley knew 

Nor Bothwell how to find 
This Mary's best magnificence 

Of the great lover's mind. 

She opens the window as the candle gutters 
out and two "voices as of a dream are heard be- 
yond." "It's a damned silly song," says the 
one. "Look at this queen, she tells you," says 
the other. For, alas! this human race of ours 
goes on and on and learns nothing. 

To the documented cases of history and the 
critical examinations and controversies over 
"the casket letters," to Mary viewed as the pro- 
tagonist in a great political struggle or the 

112 



MR. DRINKWATER'S "MARY STUART" 

victim of religious clash and bigotry let us 
add this analysis of a woman's heart, great in 
the magnificence of its capacity for love, frus- 
trated in that for which it was created; a Cleo- 
patra who could match her Ptolemy with a Darn- 
ley, perhaps even her Caesar with a Bothwell, 
but to whom there came no Antony to translate 
her into the fulfillment of a great passion, even if 
no more than a tragic one. 



NEW MUSIC ON THE ETERNAL 
TRIANGLE 



E 



NTER Madame" is a lively comedy of 



staged with the success which its sure stage tech- 
nique, its logical working out of incident and its 
ready and natural dialogue deserve. In a 
sprightly introduction, Mr. Woolcott lets us in 
back of the scenes sufficiently to learn how the 
chief personage was drawn from life, whence 
assuredly all chief and other persons should be 
drawn, a draft, so to speak, on the experiences of 
one of the authors and the interpreter of the title 
role. He tells us more of this lady's training and 
success, all of which is pleasant reading and perti- 
nent enough. We are grateful to him for not 
telling us that in "Enter Madame" enters at 
last the long-expected indigenous American 
comedy triumphant. "Enter Madame" is con- 
spicuous in not being so heralded. 

Quoting somebody, who I suppose really 
knew — else why quote him.f* — I once said: 
"There are eleven original or primitive situations 
in comedy and no more." I received the next 
day, in consequence of this deliverance, a docu- 
ment which more nearly resembled a challenge to 
mortal combat than anything else outside of 
fiction. A list of the eleven original situations 

114 



NEW MUSIC ON THE ETERNAL TRIANGLE 

was demanded, and instanter. As I did not pro- 
pose then, and do not propose now to be bullied, 
I refused to deliver the goods. Maybe I know 
and maybe I don't; at any rate I shall never tell 
the other ten; but if the eleventh — and perhaps 
one or two others besides — be not the triangle, 
then I am very much mistaken. Somebody 
equally clever, if there be any such, or else it was 
my friend. Professor William Lyon Phelps, of 
Yale, once wrote that in the concert — or was it 
the orchestra ^ — of life all the music — or it was all 
the jangling.^ — is not performed on the triangle. 
And yet I doubt not that in that important work, 
the Universal Primer of Playmaking, a consid- 
erable chapter will be found devoted to triangu- 
lation. It is the best way in which to map out 
the ground; for, starting with Adam and Eve 
and Lilith, and continuing to Antony and Cleo- 
patra and Octavia, down to the latest scenario of 
the latest gossamer film, men and women seem to 
persist in grouping themselves in threes. 

"Enter Madame" is grouped in the eternal 
three. Now, when you have three cards — in 
most games — even although two only may be of 
a kind, it is important which shall be trumps. 
The triangle here is usual enough. Gerald, an 
elderly, neglected, philandering husband, Ma- 
dame being much away; a fair widow, recently 

115 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

young, somewhat embonpoint, rather humdrum, 
but in the way; Madame Lisa Delia Robbia, 
a great singer, who returns, an artist to her 
finger tips, temperamental, adorable, quite 
capable of managing this or any situation. 
From the first moment we know that Madame 
is the trump. But how will she take the 
trick .^ Even the method is not unprece- 
dented. Things are allowed to drift until the 
first decree in divorce is granted Gerald; — we are 
to suppose for desertion, though that does not 
appear. Madame, who is supposed always to do 
the unexpected, on receiving the decree, disap- 
points her entourage by not flying into a passion. 
Instead she arranges, oifhand, a nice little fare- 
well dinner for her husband that was and the 
lady, Flora, who is to be her successor three 
months hence. Madame's and Gerald's son 
a grown young man, and his young betrothed, 
are also of the party. With these, her doctor, 
her chef, her secretary, her maid, most of them 
Italian, Madame is very much at home in her 
own house. And the talk turns on the old days 
of music, travel, adventure and romance which 
Madame and her husband had lived with these 
very people; Flora, the lady who is to marry, 
alone getting little by little more and more out of 
it. A call has come meanwhile from her manager 

ii6 



NEW MUSIC ON THE ETERNAL TRIANGLE 

asking that Madame start for South America the 
next day at noon. She is prepared to accept. Flora 
is generously constrained to leave the sometime- 
husband and wife to talk the matter over. "Are 
we not wives-in-law.^" says Madame. And the 
upshot is that although Flora interrupts them by 
phone from her flat below several times until the 
receiver is left off, Madame easily wins back her 
husband. Indeed, so complete is their absorp- 
tion that they have forgotten completely the 
trifling circumstance that they are no longer man 
and wife. In the morning, with Flora and an 
army of reporters besieging the flat, the reunited 
couple are forced to an elopement by the back 
way to fulfill Madame's engagement in South 
America and escape the scandal created by 
their conduct. 

There is, of course, much besides in the lively 
process of this comedy; a nice boy, the son of 
Madame; a nice girl, several temperamental 
Italians whose nature is well understood and de- 
picted with all their charm, love of the arts and 
irresponsibility. Nor would I insinuate the 
least criticism of the recurrence of these familiar 
figures. It is as preposterous to demand original 
figures on the stage as in an account book, the 
combination, the ordering, the art of your arith- 
metic, that is literally what counts. In "Enter 

117 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

Madame" there is a sufficiently novel ordering 
to give that pleasure of surprise in which comedy 
of this species at least largely subsists. Surprise 
in the expected, the expected wrought by novel 
means — here is the recipe. It is as easy as an 
omelet theoretically; and as tricky and precar- 
ious in the doing. And it will not attain to that 
realm of art in which abide the perfect comedy 
and the perfect omelet cheek by jowl, unless it 
has that last perfection and seasoning, distinc- 
tion of style. This, in common with most of our 
good plays, as well as the bad and indifferent, 
"Enter Madame" has not. And I doubt not 
that the authors would scorn the idea that this is 
in any wise a want. "A picture of life," their 
defender might say, "must be like life; and 
neither life nor the dialogue of life is distin- 
guished nor maintained by this quality of which 
you speak, style. " But this is just where we miss 
it. A comedy, no matter how realistic, is really 
not life, but life translated into the highly arti- 
ficial and conventional terms of the stage. We 
cannot improve the stage by making it uncon- 
ventional. We can enhance and perfect the art 
of the stage by realizing and using to the best 
advantage the conventionalities of which it con- 
sists. One of these is distinction in dialogue, 
quality in expression; not a contradiction of what 

ii8 



NEW MUSIC ON THE ETERNAL TRIANGLE 

occurs in life, but a heightening of it into the 
terms of art. Until we get this and the much 
more that this essential principle involves all the 
individualities and temperamentalities — which 
are as unreal off the stage as on — and all the little 
realities, such as telephones, for example, which 
are as wearisome on the stage as off — will not 
help us far toward an actual restoration of the 
drama to the sphere of a true art. 



"THE GREATEST PLAY SINCE 
SHAKESPEARE " 

I WAS greeted the other day by a Hterary lady 
of my acquaintance, member of several socie- 
ties for the improvement of this, that or the 
other, with the query: 

"And have you read 'Caius Gracchus'?" 

Not being possessed of the ubiquitous powers 
of reading everything that anybody writes which 
some of my unhappy kind allege that they pos- 
sess, I replied that I did not even know that 
Caius Gracchus had been written either up or 
down. 

"Why," said my fair informant, "It's the 
greatest play since Shakespeare!" 

Strange to say, I was not stunned; for the 
phrase sounded familiar. Indeed there have 
been scores of "the greatest play since Shake- 
speare." They bud and bloom in every age 
and go their fragile way to oblivion. Some 
of them I have exhumed in my day; but lacking 
the ubiquitous reading powers alluded to above, 
I suppose that many a one has escaped me. On 
examination, so far as I can learn, this particular 
"greatest play since Shakespeare" is the furth- 
est western example of its species, having put 
forth its hardy petals, if one can judge from the 
present residence of Mr. Dreiser, on the very 

120 



"CAIUS GRACCHUS" 

margin of the Pacific. Indeed I feel that we may 
agree with Mr. Dreiser, who is our informant as 
to the precise degree of the greatness of "Caius 
Gracchus," in admitting without reservation 
and even remembering the "movies," that this 
is the greatest play which has been written in 
Los Angeles since Shakespeare. 

I really do not hold any brief against "Caius 
Gracchus," which is a worthy enough effort in 
its no very unusual kind. But I am interested 
in Mr. Dreiser's Introduction and in how It 
comes that a writer of his conspicuousness, 
should suggest so surprising an inference. Ought 
Mr. Dreiser to have known better.^ Or was it 
not to have been suspected even of him,^ But 
what does he really say.? He says that for three 
centuries English metric drama has remained 
sterile; that the Elizabethan period carried no 
appeal to the generations that followed; that the 
"drab poison of Puritanism" killed the old 
drama which was "Rabelaisian," most of it, any- 
how. That pretty word, "Rabelaisian" will 
cover Mr. Dreiser's own sins in this kind, by the 
way, far better than those of old Marlowe and 
Massinger. However, let us be fair. Mr. Dreiser 
means that no one English author has held the 
stage as Moliere, Racine and Corneille in France, 
except Shakespeare. And perhaps he is right in 
his suggestion that Shakespeare's very eminence 

121 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

is the reason for this. But can Mr. Dreiser be 
ignorant that Fletcher and Jonson held the 
English stage with Shakespeare for three gene- 
rations.? Dryden for at least two, Goldsmith 
with Farquhar and other lesser men for as many.? 
And is he unaware of our splendid modern lit- 
erary drama from Byron to Tennyson, Browning 
and Swinburne, that he can mention only 
Stephen Philips, whose plays are only a little 
more stageable than these greater productions 
and a great deal more so than " Caius Gracchus. " 
But what is more remarkable is that Mr. 
Dreiser should have mistaken "Caius Gracchus" 
for an Elizabethan play. The line of tragedies on 
Roman history is a long one, extending down 
through innumerable examples to productions 
such as Bird's famous "Gladiator" here in 
America in which Edwin Forrest achieved one of 
his greatest successes, a tragedy, with all its 
faults and robustness of an earlier school, alike 
more actable and more "Shakespearean" — 
whatever that may mean — than is estimable 
"Caius Gracchus." The average Elizabethan 
play has a plot of some magnitude, it realizes 
its personages, it has movement, rarely standing 
still on a single situation; it is written in authen- 
tic blank verse and it is usually embellished with 
imagery and uplifted with poetry. Mr. Gre- 
gory's plot is meagre, not much more than a 

122 



"CAIUS GRACCHUS" 

situation, the downfall of Gracchus on the loss of 
his tribuneship and, according to this play, 
largely because of a lack of common sense on the 
part of Gracchus, which keeps him prating plati- 
tudes instead of taking the ordinary precautions 
of a prudent man. Mr. Gregory's Gracchus is a 
sublimated Brutus, to say no more of him. His 
patricians are a wonderfully wicked lot, addicted 
to crimes which remind one much more of "Ben 
Hur" than of Suetonius. The naughty young 
Rutilius is a pasteboard roue and the daughter 
of the Scipios talks more like the daughter of 
Cicero. Some of the speeches are interminable 
and others, like the two-page harangue of the 
courtesan about her profession, are irrelevant. 
Fletcher would have painted her in three lines 
and been done with it. And as to Mr. Gregory's 
crowd, crowds often lose their senses, but never 
so completely their wit. 

Elizabethan plays are written to a large ex- 
tent, as I have said, in authentic blank verse; 
they are frequently possessed of distinction in 
style; and poetry is the element in which the old 
drama lives. Mr. Gregory's verse often totters 
on the verge of prose, and while all of it is blank 
it is not always the accepted length. "To strut 
about, the masters of our people and our state" 
is four-syllables good measure for such a verse, 
and "When Troiia's prince first saw his Helen's 

123 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

radiance gleam" is two. And "If I interpret thy 
mind properly" is ten syllables long, but not 
verse. Mr. Gregory is really a very indifferent 
metrist. As to poetry, the music, the lilt, the 
levitation of it, this is about the best which I 
have been able to find in "Caius Gracchus." 

What shall I gain? What does the bard that sings 

His song in lone waste wilds; the poet when 

He fashions out his measure; or when first 

She gazes on her infant, what's the gain 

The mother hath of all her rending pains? 

What is their gain? What mine? A dream made true; 

A something yearning, straining, here within, 

That's brought to being. 

Mr. Dreiser finds the "inspiration" of this 
sort of thing "plainly that of Spenser, Shake- 
speare, Jonson and Dryden, not uninfluenced by 
the refinement of Pope. " A great deal of inspira- 
tion for a very little result. 

But it is not quite fair to Mr. Gregory, the 
victim of the extravagant eulogy of an unwise 
friend, thus to hit him over Mr. Dreiser's 
shoulders. I am inclined to think that Mr. 
Gregory has probably heard far more about the 
ancients and several other things than Mr. 
Dreiser, even though he carries back the manners 
of the empire a couple of hundred years to repub- 
lican Rome. Mr. Gregory's dialogue is direct and 
barring an occasional lapse in taste, a rare 
pseudo-poetic word like "erstwhile," and an un- 

124 



"CAIUS GRACCHUS" 

Elizabethan "he'th" for "he hath," he writes 
good, average American translated into the se- 
cond person singular. The ambitions scene of 
the Furies should be compared, not with Mac- 
beth's witches or, as Mr. Dreiser suggests, with 
the "Eumenides of Aeschylus," but with — no, 
I find no precise parallel in my reading for this 
unimpressive effort in the supernatural. Sounder 
archaeology, the realization of personality, co- 
gency in action, dramatic power, poetic lift, 
philosophic vision — and we may yet have from 
Los Angeles, home of the movies, a drama that 
will "bear comparisons." As it is, "the greatest 
play since Shakespeare" leads to the inquiry 
once made about "a dog after Landseer" 
"What's he after him for.?" 



GUITRY'S "DEBURAU" 

MR. H. GRANVILLE BARKER, long an 
acknowledged master in the drama and in 
stage craft, prefixes a suggestive note, and all too 
short, to his translation of Sacha Guitry's novel 
comedy, "Deburau. " Here is the translation 
of a play avowedly made "for English-speaking 
actors,'* not for the English-reading public, 
except incidentally; and the further purpose is 
disclosed in the words "to provide * * * as 
nearly as might be parallel opportunities to those 
the French had enjoyed in the production of the 
play." While disclaiming any theory of dra- 
matic translation, what could be happier and in 
a way more refreshing.^ Somebody once de- 
fined translation as the art of disfiguring inno- 
cent books by putting them into a jerkin in which 
even their own mother might not know them. 
The translator is apt to mix up his paints for 
blank verse, or muddle them for prose. If not, 
he may lose the sense in riding after rhymes or 
lose his rhyme in seeking a sense quite other 
than that of the original. Mr. Barker says: "It 
was easy and obvious then to keep to the irregular 
verse, if the difficulty of peppering it with rhymes 
was faced." This he has done exceedingly well, 
preserving, I should say, in the result not only 
the meaning of his original "detail by detail," 

126 



GUITRY'S "DEBURAU" 

but keeping a certain ease and litheness, which 
EngHsh blank verse could not have reproduced, 
while maintaining a variety which no set metri- 
cal form could preserve. 

The comedy "Deburau" is a huge Parisian 
success. Sacha Guitry, the author, is the son of 
the contemporary actor, M. Lucien Guitry, of a 
great and deserved reputation. The author has 
added to his fame as a playwright that of an actor 
and interpreter of his own principal role, a cir- 
cumstance the more striking in that this play 
presents in Deburau the career of a celebrated ac- 
tor in whose footsteps follows unexpectedly and 
triumphantly his own son. Such a parallel 
would be sure to take the Parisian imagination; 
and an artistic success in Paris should be — and 
usually is — echoed around the world. The sub- 
ject, too, in a larger sense, is one of a peculiar 
appeal. The stage, the actor, that dual life, on 
and off the boards, a duplicity, be it said with no 
malign accent on the word, offering so many con- 
trasts express and implied; Marie Duplessis, 
"/a dame aux cameltas'''— for she, too, figures in 
this play though not as in Dumas — the deifica- 
tion, or at least the sentimentalizing, of woman- 
hood in her most alluring, dangerous, triumphant 
and pathetic role of the destroyer: what more 
could be wanted of the universal material of life 
and of the stage .^ 

127 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

"Deburau" is emphatically a comedy for the 
stage; by which I do not mean to raise as to Mr. 
Barker's translation, much less as to the original, 
any question as to that quality of distinction in 
diction and style which everybody knows is in 
France a condition without which success must 
be courted in vain. But a play for the stage is 
one in which the capabilities of the theatre, of 
setting, of the spoken word and its accompanying 
gesture are ever in the author's mind. A play 
conceived for the stage does not begin by telling 
the scene setter, the stage upholsterer, the light 
manipulator and everybody else in seven pages 
of directions exactly what he must do, instead 
of silently enlisting his services as a humble and 
inevitable coadjutor. And a play for the stage 
does not throw the obvious in your face in person 
or in dialogue. The first act of "Deburau" is a 
model of suggestion and restraint, as each mem- 
ber of the troupe of the Theatre des Funambules 
stands out in his personality, from the "barker," 
or runner, whose business it is to cry up the play 
to passers-by, to Robillard, the thrifty manager 
and the little — and, we may suppose, deformed — 
money-taker who sends her roses to the great 
Pierrot unbeknown, and receives them' back 
from him in an outburst of careless and indis- 
criminate generosity. 

The character of Deburau, the actor, is as 
128 



GUITRY'S "DEBURAU" 

subtile and natural as It is French; a certain 
delicate fatalism pervades it. There is nothing 
flamboyant or self-assertive in this Pierrot, whose 
very success in his pantomine is silence. It is 
only on being roused that he is drawn out, as by 
the reporter in reminiscence of his past, by love 
which comes to him and then flies away in a trice 
and in the eloquent passage of the last act on the 
actor's calling. For the rest, his is a sweet com- 
plaisancy and content with "this quaint world" 
as it is and for what fate will uncover to us, alas! 
only too soon. He does not want even to know 
who it is that he has found to love after twenty 
years of "running away from women." And 
when he finds that his place in Marie's love is 
tenanted by his successor, his words are: "I 
was just going, as you see; I didn't mean to inter- 
rupt"; for "fairyland" is after all not to be his in 
this world. How should one expect it? And 
poor Pierrot departs with his little boy, his bird- 
cage and Fifi, his dog. 

Seven years pass; Deburau has fallen ill and 
is poor. He has given over acting, but always he 
awaits the coming of the peerless lady who has 
once loved him. His son has grown up, a fine 
handsome lad, secretly ambitious to follow his 
father in his career. The father is somewhat 
piqued at the idea and there is a charming bit of 
insight into the sensitive nature seemingly so 

129 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

callous that goes to make up the actor's temper- 
ament. At last Marie, the beloved, comes and 
the meeting is such as "fairyland" contrives not. 
Marie has often "been prevented from coming." 
Old Robillard has prompted her visit, not love, 
perhaps hardly compassion. But she is learning, 
now, too, what is love; for she is to lose her lover. 
Moreover, hearing that Deburau is ill, she has 
brought her doctor. "I have waited for this!" 
says Deburau. "For what.? For you to come — 
bringing your doctor! A doctor — when you 
are here! A doctor — when you are gone!" And 
it is a fine bit of irony that the doctor, not know- 
ing his patient by name, should prescribe that to 
rally his spirits he go to the theatre to see Gas- 
pard Deburau. 

I have no space for the unexpected turn of the 
last act in which Deburau fails on the stage to 
live again in his son. The eloquence and truth of 
the fine passage about acting are worthy of all 
the praise that it has received. It is gratifying, 
too, to meet with so unconventional and so artis- 
tic a conclusion. Why tie a knot in every thread 
when there is joy and beauty, too, in the skein 
unraveled? 



A TRENCHANT SATIRE ON THE WAR 

"TILULI" is Illusion, and it is a pity that for 
I V clarity's sake, in the English translation, 
this production was not so called. The note 
descriptive, printed on the temporary paper 
cover which protects the binding, for the infor- 
mation of the general reader and the guidance in 
particular of the reviewer, calls this book "a 
farce," And clearly the form, the setting by way 
of scene, the procedure by way of dialogue, all 
is dramatic; but when we consider the dramatis 
personae, which contains a score of "crowds" 
and choruses, distinguishable each from the 
other, besides such personages as Master-God, 
Duerer's Beast, Polichinello and Buridan the 
Ass, it is plain that representation on any stage 
could scarcely have been contemplated. The 
designation "farce," too, is peculiarly mislead- 
ing; for the situation of personal predicament, 
real merriment and fun for fun's sake, all are 
foreign to the ironic, satirical atmosphere of this 
strange and original production, its dealing in 
masses by way of abstraction, its allegory, its 
premeditated confusion, its bitter probing be- 
neath appearances, its sardonic pessimism. "Lil- 
uli" is really a trenchant satire; its subject the 
disillusion which has fallen on our sometime 
smug world. The author takes no sides, he 

131 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

spares none, and he leaves us in the end with no 
hope. Read superficially, it is an unpleasant 
book; read carefully, a terrible one. 

I came across "Liluli" first a couple of 
months ago. It repelled me. I could not under- 
stand how the author of "Jean Christoph, " that 
extraordinary success in French fiction just be- 
fore the war, could have written such a book, and 
I failed to get up the curiosity necessary to find 
out. Turning up again in a batch of books for 
review the other day, I was stimulated to a se- 
cond reading and an answer to this question. 
Romain Rolland, it will be remembered, was 
sometime professor of the history of music at the 
Sorbonne (University of Paris), a distinguished 
biographer, especially of Beethoven and of 
Tolstoy, by which latter he has been deeply 
affected in his opinions. Born in Burgundy, in 
eastern France, Rolland, while of many gener- 
ations of French ancestry, has none the less 
in him much of the Teutonic spirit. Indeed, 
"Jean Christoph" with its German hero, was 
an effort to reconcile the contrasts, antagonisms 
and mutual misunderstandings which separate 
Teutonic and Latin cultures; and it would have 
been difficult to conceive of one better fitted 
for that delicate task than Rolland, with 
his enthusiasm at times borderng on senti- 
mentality, that passion for art, especially 

132 



A TRENCHANT SATIRE ON THE WAR 

music, and that species of transcendentalism 
which we associated, at least before the 
war, with the Germanic genius. But Rolland 
possessed, too, the clear, logical training and 
polish and finesse which we associate as inevit- 
ably with the traditions and culture of France. 
When the war came M. Rolland was one of those 
unfortunates in whose very veins the clash 
of empires throbbed. Born a Frenchman, 
though living a cosmopolitan life, it is not 
for any one to judge his position, much 
less his conduct, of which I know little. 
A man past the years of military service, 
he appears to have lived in Switzerland 
during the conflict. That he hated war is as- 
suredly not to his nor to any man's discredit. 
Whether he is, or was, an actual pacifist I do not 
know or care. Certainly the satire of "Liluli" 
accepts the text of Mercutio: "A plague on both 
your houses!" 

The setting in "Liluli" is a mountainous 
country; certain roads wind upward and across 
the stage, leading to a bridge which spans a deep 
ravine, splitting the stage from the curtain back- 
ward in two. The chief actors speak from a field 
which occupies three-quarters of the left fore- 
ground, which is above the road. Crowds are 
continually passing up the road, impelled, where 
not by mere restlessness, by Liluli, the goddess of 

133 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

illusion, who sings like a bird and floats rather 
than walks, leading on her victims. Polichinello, 
dignified cousin of English Punch, but provided 
with the family hump — the deformity of satire — 
comments sardonically throughout on what is 
going on; children marshalled by their school- 
masters and restrained from looking about at the 
birds and the primroses as they read, marching 
along, about Hannibal crossing the Alps; the 
dreamer who describes the landscape without 
looking at it; the sensible man who observes 
everything and is none the wiser for it. Then 
comes Janot in his donkey cart, typical peasant 
of France, who, when the donkey balks at going 
further, preempts his claim on the spot where he 
stops and starts digging in his beloved mother 
earth. Soon comes Altair, visionary youth, 
Florentine, fair-haired, following Illusion and a 
form of Love which Polichinello declares 2000 
years out of date. Love escapes Altair, but 
Liluli at last charms him to sleep and turns her 
blandishments on Polichinello. She offers him 
anything; "one hump more — or less, at your 
will," and even he barely escapes her enchant- 
ment when on the very brink of the precipice. 

And now the satire becomes more savage. 
In the midst of two rival crowds extolling each 
their scores of saints, Latin and Germanic, there 
enters "a handsome, majestic, dandified old man 

134 



A TRENCHANT SATIRE ON THE, WAR 

of slightly Levantine accent, noble gesture which 
relapses into vulgarity when he is oflF his guard. " 
He is attended by Truth, a woman in Harlequin 
costume, who trundles for him his go-cart full of 
"little gods for sale." 

"Look, father, gods at reduced prices for 
families, a dollar and a quarter a' pair, seventy- 
five cents each; a thoroughly reliable article. 
Take it.^ I'll let you have it for thirty cents." 

The hawker calls himself Master-God^ to 
which Pollchlnello replies: "This Is all very 
well, but what of the Old Father.?" 

"What Father.?" 

"The Old Father up there. Are you not 
afraid of His wrath.?" 

Master-God Is amused, but politely explains 
that he is really He, to which Pollchlnello says 
"Bah!" 

Later in the play Truth is carried in triumph 
blindfolded, decorated, bedizened, cloaked and 
guarded by dervishes, sentries, diplomatists and 
journalists. She struggles free and half naked 
for a moment only to be recaptured and robed 
ceremoniously once more while the crowd is 
admonished to hide their eyes until told when 
to look. 

Two groups of people, the Gallipoulets 
and the Hurluberloches are picnicking on 
either side of the ravine. They repair the 

135 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

bridge and, on good terms with each other, 
pass refreshments and compHments, when 
the diplomatists intervene: 

"Great God, what are you making a bridge 
for? By what right? In a state that is well 
ordered whatever is not permitted is interdicted." 

And they establish customs, excises, examina- 
tions for disease and demand that the bridge be 
strengthened. 

"For what?" 

"For cannon." 

And here Polonius mounts the rostrum to 
explain: "Modeste Napoleon Polonius, dele- 
gate of the peace congress. " 

"The point in these happy days," he says, 
"is to choose, like the rabbit, with what sauce 
you wish your giblets stewed. Do you prefer 
being slaughtered above ground, under ground, 
in the air or in the water?" 

A ridiculous, a saddening scene is that in 
which poor Janot, forced from his land, on his 
ass, and Hanot on his German mule, meet on the 
bridge, both good humored, each willing to let 
the other pass, until egged on by the fat men 
(profiteers), the diplomatists, the intellectuals 
and those of fettered mind, they fall to fighting 
and both roll over into the abyss. The same 
fate is that of Altair, the youth, and his counter- 

136 



A TRENCHANT SATIRE ON THE WAR 

part and friend, Antares. And the intellectuals 
thereupon remark: 

"They have passed. Oh, what an epical 
spectacle! Down they roll! A glorious chill of 
heroic sweetness moistens me all up my back 
(Don't lean over too far.) Oh, what a sublime 
fate!" 

In the end Polichinello, who also dared not go 
with Truth, thinks to escape. But everything 
collapses "fighting people, furniture, crockery, 
poultry, stones, earth and all." Polichinello 
disappears in the heap and Liluli sings: 

Wait, ere you laugh and mock, my friend, 
At fate, ah, wait until the end. 

This is but a taste of this wholesale satire on 
mankind. I have been unable to see a copy of 
"Liluli" as the author wrote it. And I rather 
suspect that much of the poetry and nearly all of 
the style — which means so much in anything 
French — has evaporated in the process of trans- 
lation, which is anonymous and appears to have 
been none too well done. The pictures of 
Mesereel in their grotesqueness and studied 
crudity seem appropriate to a subject in which 
beauty can find no place. 



NO IMPROVEMENT ON VICTOR HUGO 

"T FEEL that the author of 'Clair de Lune' 
X has created what might be called a new 
idiom in dramatic writing. Its curiously and 
brilliantly imagined harmony of plot, characters 
and background has a strange and disturbing 
flavor which, once tasted, cannot be forgotten. 
Over it all, like the moonlight of its title, shines 
the quality of fantasy. It is 'such stuff as 
dreams are made on.'" Thus writes Mr. Ed- 
ward Sheldon, the well-known dramatist; and on 
reading "Clair de Lune" we wonder at these 
words. But Edward Sheldon as a dramatic 
critic is not our topic today. 

When I took up this play I said, as a reader 
of old fiction — or must I say, as an old reader of 
fiction.? "Ah! Ursus, Dea, Gwymplane! Of 
course, 'L 'Homme qui Rit. ' " And I might 
have spared myself this recognition of the ob- 
vious, as a note on the false title declares that 
"suggestions" as well as the names of some of 
the personages are "taken from" Victor Hugo's 
well-known novel. I then looked for some un- 
published chapters in this touching and pathetic 
story. Sir Harry Johnston has of late carried on 
the story of the Dombeys and of Mr. Shaw's 
Mrs. Warren's eccentric daughter, much to the 
delectation of readers. But this play is not of 

138 



NO IMPROVEMENT ON VICTOR HUGO 

that agreeable type. In fact, it seems less to 
expand than to contract figures, incidents and 
situations from Hugo's ample pages, changing 
his wide historic atmosphere to the stifling arti- 
ficialities of a corrupt and heartless court in a 
fantastic no-man's land and losing in the process, 
I should say, most of the human appeal. 

"The man who laughs," which is a better 
translation than "The Laughing Man," it will 
be remembered, is the terrible story of a child of 
noble English parentage, stolen out of malice and 
for revenge, and submitted to a horrible surgical 
operation by which his facial expression is 
permanently fixed in a hideous harlequin 
grin. He grows up in the company of mounte- 
banks, fathered by an old man, absurdly called 
somewhere in this play "a doctor of philosophy, " 
and a blind maiden, Dea, who loves him for the 
real beauty of his character. Restored to his 
title and his rank, the deformed Gwymplane suf- 
fers, in the circle of the nobility, the untold agony 
which his deformity has brought upon him; and 
in the end he returns to Dea, who alone under- 
stands him, only to see her die aboard a boat in 
which they are seeking escape, he following her to 
his death in the sea. There is poetry and pathos 
in Hugo's tale, and the temptation of Gwym- 
plane by a noble lady who is unnaturally at- 

139 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

tracted to him by his deformity is only an episode 
in the wide and varied scene. 

In "Clair de Lune, " by Michael Strange, 
who it is whispered audibly is really Mrs. John 
Barrymore, this last-mentioned incident becomes 
a main feature of the plot. Relieved of its moon- 
light, the story tells of a Queen, "a sharp- 
featured, neurotic-looking woman, " we may add 
of middle years. She is attended, among others, 
by Prince Charles, "a slender, exotic-looking 
gentleman, " who is her "cousin" and her heir; 
and also by the Duchess of Beaumont, a 
younger, illegitimate sister of hers, betrothed 
to Prince Charles. Boredom is a common 
characteristic of these titled people, and who 
can wonder .f* The betrothed couple, who 
loathe each other, are represented as trying 
to beguile the tedious hours with croquet. 
Parenthetically, mark how this beats out 
Shakespeare's Cleopatra at billiards. A troupe 
of mountebanks intervene, performing by 
night in the royal park. The jaded nobility 
wake up miraculously to the remarkable novelty 
of a pantomime. Charles, out of sheer ennui, is 
attracted by Dea's beauty and arranges to have 
her brought to his apartments; while his precious 
betrothed as suddenly conceives an unholy pas- 
sion for Gwymplane and his hideous grin, and 
also arranges an assignation. Mrs. Barrymore's — 

140 



NO IMPROVEMENT ON VICTOR HUGO 

or shall we say this Strange — Gwymplane is 
further deformed with "distorted legs," though 
exactly how he contrives to perform his feats of 
agility in the pantomime with this handicap is 
not quite clear. The upshot of this double 
intrigue of this precious couple, who are to be 
married tomorrow, is the discovery of each to the 
other and to the Queen, who in the end turns out 
not the rival of the Duchess for the love of 
Charles, but the mother of that now illegitimate 
Prince, Gwymplane being the true heir. There is 
a shadowy villian, Phedro, who wanders about 
through the play, but just what he is about it 
would be difficult to say. In some respects he 
seems to have been rather respectable compared 
to Charles and his Queen and his Duchess. So 
much for Mr. Sheldon's "brilliantly imagined 
harmony of plot" and of "character" and of 
"background." 

Now for "the new idiom in dramatic writing. " 

' ' The Duchess appears to me exactly like a bent 
hairpin," says theQueen,"adjustingher lorgnette." 

"Go along, Charles. At any rate, you have 
a sort of sleight-of-hand manner of looking at 
your watch that makes me rather nervous," 
says the same "neurotic-looking" lady. 

"What in the world is one tired from.^ What 
does one rest for.^" maunders the weary Duch- 
ess, "in a rather lost manner." 

141 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

"A servant is something to absorb the spittle 
of their irritabiHty. " 

We may agree with Mr. Sheldon that this is 
"a new idiom in dramatic writing." But some- 
times the dialogue strains at even a further new- 
ness." 

" I'll make you feel, " says the wicked Phedro, 
"as if you were falling down an abyss of knives": 
here at least is a threatened new sensation. No 
marvel that Gwymplane calls Phedro "a squint- 
ing rodent," and that Phedro retorts "acidly." 
"His eloquence would steal the pollen from a 
flower" sounds somewhat like what some people 
sometimes call poetry. No such nonsense, of 
course, as any jingle of rhymes or swing of metre; 
but "sob stuff," thus: "I feel as if we were in a 
black barge upon a scarlet sea, as if in a moment 
it would dip over the horizon line and we should 
be lost forever together." Or, "I see a million 
pale ribbons fluttering through gray vapor. 
They are widening into rivers of color, into vast 
dazzling spaces and some divine form is shining 
through now and sweeping all the darkness away 
off the world, with his golden wings. " There is 
nothing like this in Victor Hugo. Is this possibly 
what Mr. Sheldon calls "the quality of fantasy " ? 

That a blind girl should be sent down a long 
avenue of cypresses to stop at the "first white 
marble door" is a trifle. Even that the distorted 

142 



NO IMPROVEMENT ON VICTOR HUGO 

hero, saluted as Prince Ian of Vancluse, in the 
scene of discovery — of pretty nearly everything — 
should cry out "Oh, I cannot stand this hellish 
whirl another instant. It is biting my ankles off" 
— strange occupation for a "hellish whirl" to be 
biting a hero's ankles — even this is trivial or per- 
haps merely "such stuff as (some folks') dreams 
are made on, " to quote the dramatic critic once 
more. Less like a dream and more like the ban- 
alities of a decadent spirit is the loss in nobility 
and interest of every one of Victor Hugo's figures 
and their degradation into a series of inconse- 
quent and meaningless marionettes, whose only 
resemblance to human beings is in their essential 
vulgarity and immorality. Perhaps the glamor 
of other lights than that of the moon, handsome 
costumes and scenery and the conjunction of two 
notable personages of the stage in the cast may 
make this kind of thing go for a time. But to 
any one modestly acquainted with poetry, drama 
and the stage, it is repugnant to all. 



r 



" THE EMPEROR JONES " 

THIS volume contains three plays of the kind 
that act, and by an author obviously at home 
in the workmanship of the stage. By this I do not 
mean one who has so self-consciously labored in 
his craft that the scaffolds on the buildings of his 
construction are still standing; but rather one to 
whom the stage and its methods are simply a 
means to the effective telling of his story. These 
plays are in the popular mode which chooses to 
represent the drama of the ordinary man in the 
ordinary events of an ordinary life: that is all 
with a saving reservation assuredly for "The 
Emperor Jones." But he would be a strange 
reactionary who would go back to the old idea 
that in the hero there must be always something 
heroic, something dilated with the exaggeration 
of romance, distorted with unusual crime, de- 
corated with extraordinary virtues. To be sure, 
in this banishment of the heroic we have lost not 
a little, but possibly the most that we have lost 
is novelty. Although I suppose that it must all 
come back to the old question, shall the author 
seek to arouse an emotion in his auditors which 
shall find expression in the words, "How strange!" 
or shall he be content with what after all may be 
the more difficult task, elicit the exclamation, 
"How true." 

144 



"THE EMPEROR JONES" 

There is no side in any of these plays,they 
are written simply, directly, in the speech proper 
to the characters concerned. There is no at- 
tempt to get the reader off the ground and they 
would be none the better for such an attempt. 
"Diff 'rent" is what Mr. Shaw would call an un- 
pleasant play. Caleb, a young captain of a 
whaler in a small New England port, is about to 
marry Emma, the daughter of a fellow captain 
and a neighbor. The young people have grown 
up together and the bride-to-be, of a romantic 
turn of mind, nourished more or less on cheap 
fiction, prides herself on Caleb's and her differ- 
ence from those about them. But a tale is told 
her of Caleb in his last voyage and of the brown 
girls of Tahiti, or one of them at least, and of a 
trick that his fellows put up on Caleb. Caleb 
is too honest to deny the truth and Emma refuses 
to marry him, as after all he has proved not to be 
"diff'rent. " The two remain friends, however, 
Caleb always hoping. Thirty years later, on his 
last coming home he finds his poor old love 
utterly infatuated with a worthless nephew of 
his who works upon her folly for what he can get 
out of it. She has transformed her staid old 
home with gaudy curtains and hangings, vic- 
trola and the like, and Caleb's favorite chair has 
been sent to the attic. The picture of the old 
doting woman, in short skirts, high-heeled shoes 

145 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

and powdered face is repulsive in the exteme 
and so unusual a departure from that norm which 
after all has something to do with fiction, as it 
has to do with life, that we recoil from it as from 
a thing unnatural. And yet it is a tribute to 
Mr. O'Neill's art that we do so recoil. In the up- 
shot Caleb hangs himself and Emma, pitifully- 
disillusioned, follows him. 

"The Straw" is less unpleasant, concerning 
as it does the passionate soul of a young con- 
sumptive and how she stirs a fellow patient into 
a realization of his powers to write, what was to 
him a flirtation at first ending on the verge of 
tragedy in the union of the doomed young couple. 
There is good character sketching in the Car- 
mody family, from the brute drunkard father to 
the children, but all this and the scene, chiefly in 
a sanatorium, is depressing. However, "why 
should art be joyous.?" says our friend, M. Fin 
du Siecle. "Life is not joyous; life is even very 
depressing." "But art has nothing to do with 
life," says another of our new critics. "Then 
why be miserable?" queries still another. 
Whether I like a given subject or not is one sort 
of a question; whether, the subject granted, the 
work upon it is well done, is quite another. Mr. 
O'Neill has drawn his figures to the life, what 
more have we a right to demand.? 

146 



THE STAGE FROM BETTERTON TO IRVING 

Indubitably a play which will not act is not a 
play, whatever other fine name it may go by. 
And it is always a marvel how actable — I had 
almost written how actorproof — Shakespeare is. 
His plays are really difBcult to spoil on the stage, 
although it is amazing how frequently that dif- 
ficult feat is accomplished. Professor Odell's 
book casts a flood of light on just this point, 
affording us in the process a singular commen- 
tary on the growth of British taste and appre- 
ciation, alike for the art of acting and for the 
larger significance of Shakespeare's works. 

Nothing is so conservative and traditional as 
the stage, nor can anything be more certain than 
the gradual evolution of its successive features 
from age to age, however bewildered we may be- 
come at times in the details. At the Restoration 
a very definite process of change in the stage it- 
self had already set in. To Burbage, who first 
played the great tragedy parts in Shakespeare's 
lifetime, the stage was a platform for declama- 
tion. The auditors in the pit actually stood 
about it on three sides, and such meager decora- 
tions as the time afforded were confined more or 
less to the rear. The stage, now for over lOO 
years, has become a picture, framed, in which 
the decorations have assumed the similitude of 
the actual by means of scenes and flies fashioned 
in perspective. A careful perusal of Professor 

151 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

Odell's book gives us the steps by which this 
transformation has come about, with much 
diverting detail by the way. For example, the 
absence of a drop curtain on the old stage, meet- 
ing with the demand for a change of scene, re- 
sulted in the absurd practice of changing the 
scene with the actors on the stage. It does not 
seem to have occurred to any one that a curtain 
might be lowered at such a moment, and then 
raised. It was a generation after the introduc- 
tion of the drop curtain before anybody thought 
of lowering it between the acts. And when at 
length that momentous possibility was realized 
a painted drop was devised, similar to the scenes 
which had formerly remained set in the inter- 
missions, the green baize curtain being reserved 
to mark, as formerly, the conclusion of the play. 
But if the simplicity and incongruity of the 
scenes even in comparatively late times amuse 
us, even more ludicrous to our senses is the old 
costuming. It is surprising how recent a devel- 
opment is that of consistency of setting and cos- 
tume — I will not speak of historical accuracy, 
for that is quite outside of the question. We 
laugh at the incongruity of the medieval sacred 
plays which conceived of the Nativity as taking 
place amid the rigors of a Yorkshire winter, but 
neither Pope, an editor of Shakespeare, nor 
Fielding, a great novelist, would have seen any 

152 



THE STAGE FROM BETTERTON TO IRVING 

incongruity in Macbeth attired in a full bottom 
wig — as became the dignity of tragedy — and the 
red coat and gold lace trappings of a contem- 
porary British major general. The reader may 
see this figure in the frontispiece of Rowe's 
"Shakespeare," 1709, reproduced by Professor 
Odell, and he may likewise see from the same 
work Hamlet attired as Dr. Johnson and his 
mother seated in the likeness of Queen Anne 
beneath a portrait of "the buried majesty of 
Denmark, " arrayed as the Duke of Marlborough. 
It would appear that a certain conventional 
wardrobe was accepted for the stage for several 
generations, and it consisted of three sorts. First 
in order of antiquity came costume a la Rofnaine, 
a cuirass, lofty-crested helmet, buskins and 
heavy gloves. That delightful tragedy garment, 
the sweeping toga, doughtily to be tossed over 
the shoulder, had not yet come in. Secondly, 
there was the Asiatic-heroic, involving flowing — 
very flowing — robes, a turban, towering and 
feathered, and a scimitar; and lastly, there was 
the European, no matter of what era, represented 
by the costume of the moment, or rather a limp 
or so behind. The dresses of the actresses of old 
time were simply awesome. No one could then 
complain of scanty attire upon the stage. The 
question was to find the woman in the caparisons. 
When Mrs. Bracegirdle acted the "Indian 

153 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

Queen," befeathered, befurbelowed and be- 
fanned, with two black pages bearing up a stu- 
pendous train and supporting a canopy rather 
than an umbrella over her head, there could 
have been very little room for anything else on 
the stage. Even as late as 1778 Mrs. Hartley, 
as Cleopatra, her hair d la pompadour, her 
spreading robes of state, hooped and garlanded, 
throned voluminously on a Chippendale arm- 
chair — she must have been quite unapproachable 
even by Antony. 

Another interesting feature of Professor 
Odell's work is the complete account which he 
gives of the acting versions of Shakespeare's 
plays. The awe and veneration in which we hold 
every syllable of the Shakespearean text — the 
grave attention which we give to what James 
Russell Lowell once called "every Elizabethan 
goose-print" — was in no wise characteristic of 
our English forefathers. Shakespeare had taken 
his own wherever he found it; why should not 
his followers take of Shakespeare whatever they 
chose.? And they certainly did exercise this 
prerogative from the scandal of Dryden's "Temp- 
est, " in which a boy who had never seen a girl 
is created to match Miranda who had never seen 
a boy, to the farces cut out of the comedies, 
"Macbeth," Davenanted into an opera, and 
"King Lear" Tatified into a comedy ending. 

154 



THE STAGE FROM BETTERTON TO IRVING 

However, some of these remaklngs of Shake- 
speare for the stage are not so reprehensible. 
The conditions of staging had changed as well as 
the public taste, and some of the adaptations, 
such as that of "Richard III," by Colley Clbber, 
really make for dramatic unity and coherency. 
It may not be generally appreciated that this 
particular version of Clbber has held the stage 
almost to today. The late Mr. Mansfield acted, 
I believe, no other. As to earlier times, the great 
Garrick never acted "King Lear," except with 
Tate's happy ending in which Lear is restored to 
all of his five wits and Cordelia married to Edgar, 
while the same great actor's acting version of 
"Romeo and Juliet" arranged for the lovers a 
tender meeting In the tomb before death over- 
whelmed them. 

Tampering with the classics Is a very serious 
offense. But this is the point of view of the 
scholar. We should never cease to rejoice that 
Shakespeare was not a scholar, but a dramatist 
and an actor and a manager as well as a poet. 
I think that Shakespeare would have been the 
last man to regard the text of his plays as sacro- 
sanct. The usages of his stage, as of ours, ad- 
mitted alterations, cutting, adjustment, change 
and adaptation. This was what Shakespeare 
did to his predecessors and what he would have 
welcomed — and what he certainly got — at the 

155 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

hands of those who followed him; though It is to 
be confessed that success alone can justify the 
process, and he Is a bold man who dares attempt 
this species of literary surgery. Wherefore let us 
not quarrel with the late Sir Beerbohm Tree 
for making a spectacle of "Henry VIII," with 
Henry Irving for reducing the twenty-six scenes 
of "King Lear" to sixteen or with anybody's 
Hamlet because It Is not given complete, as Mr. 
F. R. Benson once gave It, "in six long, dismal 
hours." There Is no space to comment on the 
wealth of Professor Odell's gatherings In later as 
well as in these earlier times. His book with its 
reproductions in picture Is invaluable. 



ANOTHER VOLUME OF "SHELBURNE 

ESSAYS" 

ANOTHER volume of ''Shelburne Essays" 
. is always welcome and a matter of moment 
to readers who care for the better things in liter- 
ature and for fresh and sane views on the ten- 
dencies of current thought. For Mr. Paul Elmer 
More is not only an independent student of the 
past, he is likewise an original thinker as to things 
of the present; and it is the combination of these 
two qualities which has given him his 
popularity alike as the sometime editor of what 
was once the best of our more intelligent week- 
lies and as an essayist whose essays, in the pre- 
sent volume reaching the eleventh series, have 
become one of the standard exhibits of the solid- 
ity and health of American criticism. As with 
the former volumes, the essays contained in this 
have been variously contributed to magazines or 
delivered in lectures as that on "The Spirit and 
Poetry of Early New England, " which was one 
of the TurnbuU lectures at Johns Hopkins 
University. The substance of the essays on 
Jonathan Edwards and Emerson was contri- 
buted, we are informed, to "The Cambridge 
History of American Literature." None the 
less it is good to have fugitive writings and utter- 

157 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

ances such as these collected and revised in a 
form which has this final sanction of their author. 

To demand continuity in a volume of col- 
lected essays would be as absurd as a like de- 
mand of the variety of conversation. Indeed, 
the essay is after all only glorified monologue and 
as dependent as the monologue on the personality 
of the man who talks. Mr. More hits a happy 
mean between the familiar essay, for success in 
which one must be born fascinating, and the 
formal essay, in which ministration at the high 
altars of criticism demands the sacerdotal trap- 
pings of the oracle. What is far more important 
than any manner is the matter and the angle 
from which things are observed. Mr. More has 
much to bring us, and he brings it always ade- 
quately, often delightfully. 

As to the glorification of New England which 
has gone on now steadily since the Mayflower 
first anchored in sight of that "rock-ribbed 
shore," a cynic once remarked that it was justi- 
fied by the necessity. The perfections of New 
England, in which the climate must always be 
considered and reprobated, are tiresome in their 
reiteration; the more so that all these praises are 
so undoubtedly based on "rock-ribbed" facts. 
One who is not a New Englander, except by 
summer occupation, sometimes wonders whether 
those really to the manner born protest so much. 

158 



ANOTHER VOLUME OF "SHELBURNE ESSAYS" 

But these remarks are irrelevant to the clear- 
sighted discussions of this part of Mr. More's 
book. However, while it may be just to consider 
the "poetry" of Mistress Ann Bradstreet or 
Urian Oakes with the allowance that it came out 
of an unpoetic stock, transplanted into an austere 
climate in which only the sternest of the virtues 
theologically watered could flourish, still, after 
all, is this kind of versified meditation and moral- 
izing really poetry at all, and not rather the kind 
of thing which marks poetical negation.? I be- 
lieve that Thoreau somewhere indulges in an ap- 
preciation of the beauties of the music of an 
accordion. This passage is not a proof that 
Thoreau's Puritan nature was softened by the 
concord of sweet sounds. It merely shows that, 
true to his stock, there was no real music in him. 
One thing I must protest. No one of these old 
New England platitudes in verse is comparable 
to, much less referable in any wise to, "Nosce 
Teipsum," the fine philosophical poem of 
Elizabethan Sir John Davies. To read one page 
of Davies will settle that. But I note there, as 
very rarely, Mr. More has been betrayed by "a 
great authority." The comparison of Mistress 
Bradstreet to Sir John was the late Professor 
Wendell's, not Mr. More's. 

Of the New England essays I like best that on 
Jonathan Edwards. Mr. More is at his best in 

159 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

that difficult region in which philosophy abuts 
upon religion, and a clearer, a more justly sym- 
pathetic estimate of Edwards, who dwelt verily 
at the heart of Puritanism, might be sought for 
elsewhere in vain. There are some keen bits of 
insight, too, on the much overwritten topic, 
Emerson. What could be simpler, for example, 
than "Emersonianism may be defined as roman- 
ticism rooted in Puritan divinity?" or the thrust: 
"It is significant of this confidence in individual 
inspiration that generally in Emerson, as in other 
poets, it tends to looseness and formless spon- 
taneity of style".? It is a genuine contribution, 
too, to our understanding of the Puritan spirit to 
have pointed out to us the parallel between Ed- 
wards in his "revolt against the practice of the 
communion as a mere act of acquiescence in the 
authority of religion" and Emerson's similar and 
equally logical revolt based in a disavowal of any 
conformity in faith and a demand in its stead of 
"the entire liberty of each soul to rise on its own 
spiritual impulses." 

Among the essays dealing with later times, 
of Henry Adams possibly we have had enough 
and more than enough. Mr. More is very enter- 
taining on that entertaining topic and even more 
so in "Samuel Butler of Erewhon, " whose enig- 
matic personality emerges under the essayist's 

i6o 



ANOTHER VOLUME OF "SHELBURNE ESSAYS" 

hand In a way quite striking. Butler is of course 
a seasoning, not a food, but a condiment a taste 
for which is to be acquired. Mr. More helps in 
the acquisition and provokes in the reader of 
"Erewhon" and "The Way of All Flesh"— which 
is a detestable story, by the way — a desire to 
read further. 

In "Evolution and the Other World," "Eco- 
nomic Ideals" and "Oxford, Women and God," 
the essayist touches some of the most important 
of our contemporary issues. The first of these 
declares very definitely against what is almost an 
obsession of our time, the application of the 
theory of evolution, usually as misunderstood, to 
things to which it is utterly inapplicable; although 
the essay very justly concludes with the remark: 
"It is not a new thing that a sound intuition 
should be supported by an untenable theory." 
In the last of these it is asked why the admission 
of women to Oxford's cloistered society and the 
banishment of God should have synchronized. 
But Mr. More is too wise a man to hazard an 
answer. Lastly, in "Economic Ideals" we have 
set forth our mania for combinations further to 
enhance mechanical mastery over nature and the 
contrasted mania for combinations to protect 
man as an individual from man as a machine. 
Most pertinently does the author ask if both are 

i6i 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

not referable to that terrible uncertainty that 
haunts us day and night and if we have gained 
much in the substitution of this fear of our fellow 
man for the old-fashioned fear of God. These 
are great topics even to name in one paragraph. 
But be it remembered that a review is no real 
short cut, but only a guide post, pointing, let us 
hope, in the right direction. 



A SOUND ENGLISH CRITIC 

THIS volume is made up of a score of leaders 
and special articles, variously contributed 
by the author and now happily collected under a 
caption which, however, is somewhat misleading. 
For, save for two or three essays which have to 
do with reviewing, the critic and the labors of 
authorship, the book is less concerned with the 
art of letters than with English writers biograph- 
ically and personally considered as well as ap- 
praised by way of their achievement in poetry 
and in prose. The work comes under that wide 
title, a book about English literature, and this 
generous subject extends from gossip to meta- 
physics, and from esthetic criticism all the way 
back to anecdotage. To those who really love 
books and the people who make them, to those 
who devoutly believe that, with all their short- 
comings, the poetry, the novels and the letters of 
an age better represent its spirit than its history 
or its laws, no such book can be unwelcome. 
And Mr. Lynd's acquaintance with his subject- 
matter is as honest and complete as his views are 
sensible and helpful. 

There is an unpretentiousness about this vol- 
ume, too, which is pleasing. Here is no flourish 
by way of preface; a short dedicatory letter to a 
personal friend suffices. There is no putting of 

163 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

the best foot forward, only a rough chronological 
ordering which places Mr. Pepys very inaus- 
piciously in the lead, presented in one of his least 
really important aspects; however, it is one 
which, like the treasure of a Swiss villager, is 
noisomely heaped in the front yard for traveler 
and guest to stumble over. Mr. Lynd 
has not even assumed that his book is important 
enough to index, so that a reader might recur to 
something he liked. I recall how the Nation be- 
fore the twilight of the godkins used to dilate on 
the choice corner reserved in the next world for 
such as published books unindexed. But I 
should rather lay this omission in the present 
case to modesty than to neglect, for after all it is 
assuming something in this day of hurry and 
reading by snatches to presuppose that sedulous 
pottering over a book which suggests the nec- 
essity of a complete and labored index. 

Passing by one or two shorter pieces, the 
paper on Donne is of considerable fullness, em- 
phasizing, as is the manner in these days, the 
actualities, the autobiographicalities, if one dare 
employ so lengthy a word. The eroticism of 
Donne needs not too strong an emphasis on the 
second syllable, for neither he nor his age was 
degenerate. This feature in Donne has always 
seemed to me a part of that experimental nature 
which was so essentially his. When Donne 

164 



A SOUND ENGLISH CRITIC 

studies the stars, he is apt to stray into astrology; 
science takes him into alchemy; theology even 
into the scrutiny at least of heresy and schism. 
So love, of which no English poet has left a purer, 
more ethereal, a more completely metaphysical 
conception, took Donne by the way into forbid- 
den paths out of a species of curiosity rather than 
because of sensualism. Mr. Lynd is thus right in 
considering Donne "the supreme example of a 
Platonic lover among the English poets, " as he is 
also just in recognizing in him "the completest 
experimenter in love." 

A sympathetic piece of insight is the pleasant 
paper on Horace Walpole, who is aptly described 
as "a china figure of insolence," one who "lived 
on the mantlepiece and regarded everything that 
happened on the floor as a rather low joke." 
However, the author is not unjust to this "doer 
of little things in a little age, " one only too appre- 
ciative of his own small place in the order of time. 
This idea of the miniature nature of the world of 
the eighteenth century recurs, much to the illum- 
ination of the subject. There is light in the des- 
ignation of Cowper's genius as "not that of a 
poet, but of a letter writer, " and it is interesting 
to be made to realize to what an extent Gray was 
a poet of the afterthought. He was years over 
the famous "Elegy," reaching a greater perfec- 
tion with each revision. Has there ever been his 

165 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

like in reticence since the beginning of time? 
Better provided with aunts — we may assume 
indulgent, affectionate, maiden, tea-drinking 
aunts — than any poet in English literature, 
Gray let no one of them, nor even his own mother 
know that he wrote poetry. Such, alas, was the 
soil of poetry in a genteel age! Mr. Lynd's ex- 
cellent paper on Edward Young as a Critic will 
come as a surprise to some who feel that they 
know English literature. What could be better 
in these days of the unread and much belauded 
classics than this of Young? "The less we copy 
the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them 
the more. Become a noble collateral, not an 
humble descendant from them." 

It is impossible to treat in so brief a space the 
many good things of this book. The author 
turns the tables neatly on certain conservative 
writers who have claimed that outspoken hater 
of war and injustice. Dean Swift, for their own. 
Even Coriolanus is shown not to be so cer- 
tain an example for the Tory spirit to exult in. 
Mr. Lynd pursues an excellent, if somewhat un- 
usual method, in the treatment of several authors 
of a certain complexity of nature. Instead of 
taking that complexity in all its difficulty and 
floundering in it, he views Shelley, for example, 
first startlingly though with entire justice, as 
"a character half-comic," secondly as "the ex- 

i66 



A SOUND ENGLISH CRITIC 

perimenter, " lastly as " the poet of hope. " This 
gets us further in our understanding than 
Arnold's famous "beautiful and ineffectual an- 
gel, " although it serves us with no such charming 
a literary label. I find, too, the treatment of George 
Meredith both suggestive and informing. His 
exotic, false pride and unadaptability of nature 
needs only to be thus clearly stated to carry with 
it conviction; and the emphasis on his Anglo- 
Irish blood explains much. 

Passing the interesting papers on Mr. Saints- 
bury and Mr. Gosse, the two English critics 
whose roots are in the Victorian age, but who 
have survived adaptable and proficient in their 
art, and likewise omitting the just appraisement 
of some of our contemporary Georgians, Mr. 
de la Mare, Mr. Sassoon and some others, the 
final essays of this volume are taken up with the 
matters which give to the book its title. Mr. 
Lynd is orthodox in theory as to poetry, criticism 
and the like. But his orthodoxy is of the reason- 
able sort, and he is both willing and able to give 
an account of it. If we are to regard poetry, for 
instance, as a resolution of order out of the chaos 
of nature, it is fair that we recognize that this is 
an order "not imposed from without but con- 
trolled from within." The poet and not the 
grammarian is he who "sets up the rules." Mr. 
Lynd makes no objection to the idea that criti- 

167 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

cism may be praise, but it must be the praise of 
that which in the product concerned is vitally 
praiseworthy. Correspondingly, he accepts the 
alternative function of blame; but blame of that 
wherein the thing may have fallen short of its 
own design, not blame that it fails to reach some 
extraneous and preconceived standard. As to 
the last paper on book reviewing, the present 
reviewer will lay it to heart, not so much that it 
differs in theory so much from his own orthodoxy 
in ideal and would-be practice, but that it is well 
to have the laws of Mount Sinai ever before us, 
however in the frailty of the flesh we may from 
time to time deviate from them. 



SOME FORGOTTEN TALES OF 
HENRY JAMES 

TWENTY years ago the present reviewer 
would have been more deeply interested 
in this book than he can feel himself today. At 
that period he was more "versed" in American 
fiction and likewise far better read in the short 
story. For those were the simple days when 
we fell into heated discussions as to the "bold 
realism" of "Daisy Miller" or the outspokenness 
of "The Rise of Silas Lapham" and wondered 
whether such things transcended — or fell below — 
the level of dignified art; whether Howells could 
hope to maintain the said literary level when 
"The Europeans" of Henry James appeared; 
whether a certain obscurity of diction was not 
a mark of distinction and the like. But much 
has passed in twenty years and, with many lesser 
things, both of these distinguished novelists, the 
American who elected to remain an American, 
and the American who heightened the Bostonian 
in his temperament by becoming a British subject. 
Twenty years ago people wrote short stories 
in innocent oblivion of all the nice little rules and 
pretty little distinctions which have since been 
formulated and codified respecting this happy 
and lucrative branch of the writing of fiction. 
The momentous discovery that a short story is 

169 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

not a story that is short, but a new genre — I had 
nearly written gender — in Hterature, only 
properly to be designated as a "short-story," 
or even more intimately a " shortstory, " had not 
as yet been made. And the amiable gentlemen 
who, howsoever they do not themselves "short- 
story," none the less teach the new art by pre- 
cept, correspondence and otherwise, had not as 
yet begun their chorus of tedious iteration. 

The volume, "Master Eustace," follows 
"A Landscape Painter" in collecting five more 
stories of Henry James "which originally ap- 
peared in American periodicals," but which "for 
some reason unknown" were never issued by the 
author "in book form in this country." These 
stories will be welcomed by lovers of James and 
of good writing, and I take it that the two classes 
are very much the same; but they will be recog- 
nized by the judicious as of unequal merit. The 
writer of the preface to this volume, Mr. Mordell, 
is disposed to discover a projection of the author 
again and again in these tales. I cannot but 
think rather more highly of the art of Henry 
James than this. The greatest artist sees only 
with his own eyes, to be sure; but the very 
first condition of the art of fiction is that 
power of sympathy which enables the writer 
to sink himself in the point of view, if not in the 
personality, of personages of his creation. In 

170 



SOME FORGOTTEN TALES OF HENRY JAMES 

this very book the first story is told, and I should 
say effectively told, by an elderly observant lady 
attendant, and it properly exhibits the limita- 
tions of such a personality, not once transcending 
them. "A Light Man" once more derives its 
power, which is considerable, from the revelation 
of a selfish, petty and essentially dishonest per- 
sonality who tells the story. I have never been 
wholly captured by Henry James, so that I bow 
joyfully under his yoke as under that of greater 
conquerors such as Hardy or George Meredith; 
but, remembering James in larger draughts than 
the lees of a small volume of neglected minor 
stories, I acknowledge in him a subtler artist 
than this. 

"The less of a volume of neglected minor 
stories the better" is putting it strong. And yet 
nobody is likely to deny this as to the trivial, 
almost banal, "Theodolinde, " a pot-boiler which 
the fastidious taste of the author of "The Por- 
trait of a Lady" or "Europe," which Mr. Ford 
Maddox Hueffer calls "that most wonderful of 
all stories, " would assuredly never have cared to 
see exhumed from the temporarypagesof a certain 
American magazine; it would be invidious to say 
which. "Benvolio" is, to be sure, delightful, and 
I notice that it appeared twice in English re- 
prints, evidently with the author's sanction. 
Indeed, a nice question might be raised here as to 

171 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

an author's rights in posthumous suppression. 
Few modern writers have suffered from the reti- 
cence of editors, executors, pubHshers and the 
Hke. And the discarded leavings of great authors 
seem to possess a strange fascination for a cer- 
tain type of mind, which might be described as 
BoswelHan were to do so not an affront to an ad- 
mirable man who knew what to do with a trifle 
when he had picked it up. No man can toil in 
the busy workshop of this life without scattering 
a few chips and leaving a few rough drafts and 
abortive sketches lying about after he has de- 
parted, and these, whether "escaped into print" 
or not, are only too often carefully gathered up 
and displayed in bulk windows to the discredit 
and scandal of his art. As to the stories of this 
volume, I have already said that they are un- 
equal, although there is not one which has not 
that touch of distinction in style which makes 
the reading of Henry James a pleasure, whether 
you contrive to become interested in the story 
which he has to tell or not. 

Not the least notable thing about this dis- 
tinguished man of letters — this philosopher 
writing fiction as his famous brother, the psychol- 
ogist, William James, was a novelist writing 
philosophy — is the circumstance that Henry 
James has enjoyed an enormous popularity for 
one who is, when all has been said, after all, 

172 



SOME FORGOTTEN TALES OF HENRY JAMES 

caviar to the general. As I look back at a ran- 
dom acquaintance with, I confess, only too few of 
the imposing list of the stories of James, short 
and long, I find myself recalling remarkably few 
of his personages which, with their adventures, 
are secondary to the personality of the novelist, 
which is always present in his work. Perhaps I 
have been unfair to Mr. Mordell in what I have 
written above; and that what strikes him in 
"Benvolio" as an autobiographical projection, 
so to speak, into the picture, is the very thing 
which I have just expressed somewhat otherwise. 
Here again an interesting query arises. Why do 
the strongest natures among writers so often 
shroud their personality in difficulty? For there 
is a certain difficulty in reading Henry James, 
exquisite though the medium in which he ex- 
presses his thought and certain as you can be 
that it is thought — never emptiness, as with some 
who are enigmatic— which he is expressing. I 
do not possess an answer offhand to this ques- 
tion, but I know that acquaintanceship with 
such is precious, for words, as this world goes, 
are less often the sumptuous raiment of a true 
nobility than a preposterously ample cloak in 
which to hide chattering beggary of thought. 

Let us welcome, then, Master Eustace, some- 
what unconvincing though that melodramatic 
young person remains, and let us accept "Long- 

173 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

staff's Marriage, " although we may be skeptical 
as to the symmetry of any story's working out 
like that in life. "Theodolinde" is forgivable 
for the charming description of a very pretty 
woman, and "A Light Man" is a fine, if forbid- 
ding, piece of psychological insight. But when 
my friend. Professor Phelps, declares that "even 
Thomas Hardy can hardly dramatize the irony 
of life more powerfully" than James does in 
this particular volume, I must protest even 
against Delphi. Whatever the truth is as to the 
larger canvases painted at length, in these 
lesser sketches in pencil of James there is none 
of the stroke, the bite, the deep velvet line of 
him who wrote "Life's Little Ironies." 



THE VERITABLE QUEEN OF 
ENGLISH FICTION 

THIS is a somewhat naive little book. After 
the many works which the fame of Jane 
Austen has attracted, books of criticism and 
appraisement, of collections and biography, after 
the publication long sinceof unfinished fragments, 
some of them never intended by the author for 
publication, and of such letters as a kind of 
prudery on the part of her sister, Cassandra, 
in particular, had not succeeded in destroying, 
we may certainly feel that we have harvested 
and gleaned up all on this subject that there was 
left for us to know. And it can as certainly not 
be said that Miss Austen-Leigh's volume has 
more than a few corroboratory crumbs to offer. 
And yet if the reader happens to be of that choice 
and devoted brother and sisterhood who feel, 
perhaps rather than know, that Jane Austen is, 
without question and compare, the veritable 
queen of English fiction, it is a joy to finger over 
these little personal things that once were hers, 
be they no more than a reproduction of the 
pleasing and well-known Zoff ay portrait, penciled 
drawings of Steventon and Chawton, "ac- 
counts" from her father's Parish Register in 
her exquisite handwriting and charades — we 
should call them riddles — with which these cheer- 

175 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

ful, gentlefolk of a simpler age beguiled the ted- 
ium of the long winter evenings when ways were 
foul and social life beyond the family circle im- 
possible. 

It is fair to say, however, that Miss Austen- 
Leigh has been urged to the pleasant task of 
compiling her little book, less to preserve such 
mementoes as these than to protest against a 
tendency in critical writings about her great 
kinswoman of late to appraise Jane Austen some- 
what narrowly and in the direction of negation 
rather than by way of a reconstruction of what 
we have. Miss Austen-Leigh repels the accus- 
sation that Jane Austen did not love children, I 
should say, both successfully and conclusively. 
And taking a position, which I am sure most 
lovers of the delicate and consummate art of Jane 
Austen would think altogether unnecessary, 
Miss Austen-Leigh argues in one of her chapters 
for a certain serious intent which she finds in 
Jane's emphasis of repentance as a motive in 
most of her stories. The morality of the arts is 
always a dangerous subject; and there is a type 
of mind which remains unsatisfied with the play 
which does not preach and the novel which does 
not moralize. Jane Austen wrote no such im- 
proving books for the young and others as did 
her distinguished and forgotten contemporary, 
Hannah Moore, for example. But does Jane 

176 



THE QUEEN OF ENGLISH FICTION 

Austen need justification along these lines, with 
her eye for truth, her power of analysis in a flash, 
her delicious wit and her sound heart? When 
Miss Austen-Leigh, in a chapter sagely headed 
"Morality," quotes Jane as writing "I am very 
fond of Sherlock's Sermons and prefer them to 
almost any," we wonder if she mentally added 
"sermons." Jane was quite capable of such an 
equivoke. The salt of a ready, wholesome wit 
was in her. 

It seems that Jane Austen has been the sub- 
ject of late of a dissertation. "5^ vie et son 
oeuvre^^ have been scrutinized ^'par Leonie Fillard, 
Agregee de rUniversite, Docteur es lettres,''^ 
and the doctorate has been bestowed by the 
Sorbonne. One wonders how Jane would have 
received the news of so unheard-of a wonder. 
A woman doctor, too, at that. Now a doctor's 
dissertation is a grave matter, to the "docteur" 
and to others, and the "reaction" — as the 
psychologists have taught us to say — the reac- 
tion of a young French woman studying at Paris 
in 191 5 to the novels of a young English woman 
of a century ago, whose subject was her own con- 
temporary life in what was, after all, almost wholly 
the provinces, is decidedly interesting. I have 
unhappily not been able to see Mile. Villard's 
thesis; but, of course, as Miss Austen-Leigh in- 
forms us, Mile, thinks "Mees Austen" of a hun- 

177 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

dred years ago narrow, parochial and wanting in 
religious feeling. She cites " authorities " to show 
that the Church of England was, in Miss Aus- 
ten's day, "destitute of religious fervor," "a 
thing made up of traditional rites," wherefore 
no one of Miss Austen's novels deals with the 
salvation of a soul, we may suppose; and many 
other important things unknown to Jane and 
to her world are wanting. It is a prevalent 
doctoral temptation to judge a thing meticu- 
lously for what it is not and never could be; 
and this method of judgment is not confined to 
the doctoral thesis. Jane Austen did not travel; 
she ought to have traveled. She did not write 
romances, "historical romances on the house of 
Coburg, " as suggested by the Prince Regent's 
librarian. Dr. Clarke; she had the good sense not 
to. But people who write historical romances 
are supposed to have a wide range of ideas. 
Jane Austen was not learned, nor a linguist, nor 
scientific, nor a poetess; ergo, she must have 
been narrow. And valiant Miss Austen-Leigh 
rushes to the defense to prove that her Jane 
knew a little French and a little less Italian, that 
she painted prettily, was a skilful needle-woman, 
wrote charades, was "the best musician in an 
unmusical family" and had really traveled as far 
as Bath and Southampton and even London. 

178 



THE QUEEN OF ENGLISH FICTION 

Genius is not to be measured by these trivial 
standards. Let us be frank about it. The esti- 
mable provincial life of the gentry of the England 
of Jane Austen was narrow and restricted, intel- 
lectually, socially and spiritually. And Jane 
really "knew" no other life than that in which 
she had been reared. She shared in its limita- 
tions. I am willing to accept the somewhat sple- 
netic report of Miss Mitford's mother that Jane 
was at one time "the prettiest, silliest, most 
affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever re- 
membered," remembering that the observer was 
herself young, perhaps not so pretty and not yet 
married. And I will also accept the very dif- 
ferent remark of another young woman that 
"silent observation from such an observer (as 
Miss Austen) was rather formidable. " This was, 
of course, much later. Allowing for the reti- 
cence in woman, which was then regarded as an 
eighth to the seven cardinal virtues, it is im- 
possible to believe that so ready and witty a 
writer was not ready and witty in conversation, 
though Jane appears to have been a woman of 
kind heart and an admirable self-control. She 
was doubtless very variously estimated by those 
who knew her, and the gamut of her rich person- 
ality ranged all the way from a love of company 
and dancing to the deepest and tenderest insight 
into character and emotion. The candor of Jane 

179 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

Austen's young people in their love of pleasure 
is delightful. Miss Kirkland has recently written 
a witty essay on "Victuals and Drink in Jane 
Austen." I hope that she may be prevailed on 
to write another on "Husband Hunting in Jane 
Austen." Why not accept the world as it is.'' 
It is because Jane Austen does precisely this, be- 
cause she is interested in the trifles that go to 
make up daily life and character, because she is 
absolutely clear-sighted and a great artist in her 
power to transfer all this to her pages, that she 
is the inimitable novelist that she is. The 
measure of art is ever qualitative. Leave quanti- 
tative analysis to science. The subject is noth- 
ing; it is the degree to which the thing under- 
taken approaches perfection that counts. With 
the approach to perfection as our criterion, the 
degree of achievement in the thing undertaken, 
Jane Austen stands almost alone. 



THE NEW STONE AGE 

WHAT an anthropologist or an archaeologist 
or other specialist might say about this 
book I have absolutely no means of determining. 
Exactly what I am to do with it is a question 
which only the completion of this review can 
tell. I am a layman, simple and innocent In this 
whole matter; innocent except for a big book, 
the title of which and its author I have forgotten 
after the manner of unscientific people. This 
was a book about round heads and long-headed 
people in a sense apparently very different from 
the historical roundhead or the business long- 
headed man. Another really delightful book of 
my reading was Mr. Osburn's about this very 
stone age, and, latterly, I have read the resume 
of the whole subject so delightfully told by 
Mr. Wells In his " Outlines of History, " so severely 
criticised by those who have not read It. I can 
see that I am properly one of Professor Tyler's 
readers of this pre-history, as he calls It, "intel- 
ligent and thoughtful, " let me hope, and certainly 
"puzzled" in a multiplicity of "facts," at times, 
may I say it without offense, all but "smothered 
In surmise." 

The most striking thing about a book such as 
this is the extraordinary conviction which it 
must carry, to the thinking man of the absolutely 

i8i 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

provisional character of all our scientific learning. 
Here is the careful gathering together of an 
enormous mass of material, remains, shell, stone, 
metal, ceramic and other of man's prehistoric 
life on the globe, as variously described and inter- 
preted by hundreds of investigators, with addi- 
tional matter touching geology, geography, 
climate and all the sciences of life at one end, 
history, philology, language, folklore and re- 
ligion at the other. It is fair to Professor Tyler 
to say that he warns the reader again and 
again of the uncertainties of interpretation, the 
incompleteness of knowledge, the dangers of 
inference and the like. The process of reading 
this book is like a perilous journey over floating 
cakes of ice with deep water and wide water 
yawning between. We are secure on a little 
island for a moment or two only to take a peri- 
lous leap to the next cake; we balance daintily 
on a neatly floating assertion or slip on an infer- 
ence which we fear is going to topple over with 
us, only to repeat these dangerous leaps from 
one uncertainty to the next. I confess that 
when shore was reached — or was it only the 
bordering morass of the folklore margin of his- 
tory.? — I breathed a sigh of relief. But solid 
ground there can be none in such a subject. I 
wonder where solid ground is left us anywhere, 
for that matter. We used to find it in religion. 

182 



THE NEW STONE AGE 

But there my solid ground was not your solid 
ground. We used to find it in the laws of gravi- 
tation. But Dr. Einstein with his doctrine of 
relativity has upset all that. We used to think 
that we were conveying a sort of solidity in 
knowledge to the young in our colleges and 
universities. But Mr. Edison tells us that col- 
lege boys do not know anything. Do their pro- 
fessors.? Does Mr. Edison.? Science is coming 
be a disheartening affair. 

Out of the water we came, out of the ooze and 
slime; onto the land, where we developed lungs; 
into the trees, where we developed hands and 
prehensile tails; out of the trees onto the ground, 
again, where we learned to walk upright and, I 
suppose, became apprehensive instead of pre- 
hensive. And now we go back into the water 
without gills and up into the air without organic 
wings. Cave dwellings, pit dwellings, lake dwell- 
ings, dolmens and other big stones and struc- 
tures, for burial or ritual; shell implements, stone 
axes, flint knives, at last copper and bronze; so 
the ever-fascinating story runs with its infer- 
ences as to various races, their migrations, their 
modes of life, the routes of trade, their ideas and 
superstitions. The tale of prehistoric man is 
fascinating for what we know, even more so as to 
what we do not know. The most important steps 
seem the least certain. I cannot make out what 

183 



APPRAISEA4ENTS AND ASPERITIES 

it is that distinguishes a man from an ape either 
in this book or in actual Hfe for that matter. 
Has Gardner got us nearer the solution of the 
question how speech arises in man? Were there 
once talking apes? Were there speechless men? 
Or, harder to believe, speechless women? Is 
there a better story — or at least one more scien- 
tific — than that of Prometheus as to that mo- 
mentous step, the discovery by man of the use of 
fire ? Did property beget the idea of strongholds, 
or only the impulse of the hunted beast to escape 
an enemy? Things like this are discussed less 
in books of this kind than questions as to whence 
came the Aryans, for example. Professor Tyler 
registers carefully the wise words of warning, 
uttered long ago by Max Muller, as to the word 
Aryan; how it means "neither blood, nor bones, 
nor hair, nor skull," but merely language. But 
the rest of this very chapter generalizes at once 
as to races, customs, Celts, Indo-Europeans 
and the like. The origin of Aryan culture in 
the North, the East or the West seems a trivial 
matter. Suppose we can put the finger on the 
spotwhereon lived the first Arj^an family. Would 
it matter? And who was Mr. Aryan's grand- 
father? And, pray, what was Mrs. Aryan's mo- 
ther's family after all? I rather suspect that this 
whole subject of origins in northern "kultur" 

184 



THE NEW STONE AGE 

among the Germans is a learned bit of that 
propaganda to which the war opened our eyes. 
Professor Tyler has what seems to me a strange 
notion to the eflfect that the Teutonic stock " were 
never good mixers." Good mixers is precisely 
what they are. Goths, Vandals, Lombards, 
Northmen, Normans, Angles, all are Teutonic 
and all mixed admirably with whatever people 
they came into contact with, taking on new 
languages, customs and what not. The mixed 
blood of these, the ruling peoples of the earth, 
is their glory. 

However it may beget question, it is just 
such popular gatherings-in and appraisements of 
what the learned world is doing that help us 
laymen in our doubts and therefore in our 
arduous steps in knowledge. It is interesting to 
know just what domestic animals the lake 
dwellers had, and it is pleasant to surmise the 
agricultural occupations of prehistoric woman. 
But I wonder who made the first needle or in- 
vented the safety pin which was not unfamiliar 
among the Etruscans. I am not sure that such 
questions are quite as profitable as surmises, 
between 6000 and 20,000 years, B. C, for the be- 
ginnings of Neolithic man. How we are obsessed 
with beginnings and endings! Perhaps there 
never was a first man, or he may have "occurred" 

185 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

simultaneously or successively in a score of places 
and perhaps there is to be no end. The old 
philosopher who recognized only "becoming," 
an eternal state of change and flux, most closely 
guessed at truth. We are on our way, whence 
and whither.? Do we know? We may guess 
theologically, scientifically or metaphysically; 
all these guesses are merely different points of 
view. Satisfying answer there is none. But 
why should anybody be satisfied.? 



A BREATH OF FRESH AIR 
ON EDUCATION 

THIS is a book after my own heart. Have 
you ever held pecuHar views for years and 
been looked at askance by your friends, smiled 
at indulgently, allowed for until you have be- 
come silent, not with the silence of acquiescence, 
but with the silence that comes from that ter- 
rible question: "What's the use?" Well, such 
is my case as to the schools as men have made 
them and as to the men who have made the 
schools. And here is one of the elect — for the 
elect are they who write in the Atlantic Monthly 
— who has justified my heresies, expressing in 
criticism upon criticism ideas which conform to 
convictions which I have long held and express- 
ing them in a manner and with a charm which 
any man might well be proud to equal. I had 
read some of these chapters already in the 
Atlantic. They make a fine cumulative effect 
thus collected. Mr. Yeomans, we are told, is 
"a Chicago manufacturer of steam pumps, who 
enjoys playing the cello, sailing a boat along the 
New England coast in summer and passing the 
winter in California." But all this only partly 
describes him, Mr. Yeomans is a man with an 
eye for the significance of beauty, with a heart 
tender to the children on whom the absurdities 

187 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

of our educational system heap many Indignities, 
with a large apprehension of the greater things 
of life. I take my hat off to this book. 

Mr. Yeomans, in discussing schools in gen- 
eral, declares that much of our human society " is 
still immersed in neolithic thought" and asks 
pertinently "what the proportion of discrimin- 
ating and intelligent people is, who knows .^" 
At the outset he recognizes two classes, "practi- 
cal people whose mental structure is mechanical, 
* * * exploiters of men since all eternity," 
and "the emotional, the poetic, the artistic, the 
lovers of beauty and the distributors of a pecu- 
liar happiness." Boards of education, whether 
of college or school, seldom belong to the latter 
class, and superintendents and teachers — except 
for the few of the latter who escape — are herded 
along by the kind which chooses them. It is the 
mechanical group which is at present exploiting 
education and the momentary enthusiasm is 
charts, intelligence tests and percentages. Per- 
haps the next enthusiasm will be time clocks. 
Mr. Edison, we are told, conforms his labors to 
one. Much to the scandal of schools of pedagogy, 
Mr. Yeomans believes that a teacher is born, not 
manufactured, and should be taken, even un- 
certificated, when found, as a rare product. He 
has the audacity to doubt if a teacher can be 
turned out by means of courses In how to do it. 



A BREATH OF FRESH AIR ON EDUCATION 

He even believes that "the Hfe of a teacher may 
easily disqualify him to teach" and that infor- 
mation is the least important feature of educa- 
tion — pace Mr. Edison — when all has been said. 

"This is rank educational bolshevism!" I hear 
the professor of class discipline exclaim to the 
superintendent of manual dexterity. "It is 
awful to think that there are such people outside 
of Russia, just as we had got everything into 
apple-pie order, everything nicely graded, a 
certified teacher in every class, " not one of them, 
we may add, not properly vaccinated with the 
virus of pedagogic training. 

Valiant is Mr. Yeomans' attack upon the 
idea, only too prevalent, that "the Way, the 
Truth and the Life are along a road that leads to 
recognition." In our colloquial phrase, "Am- 
bition is the vice of noble minds. " And we lay a 
stronger emphasis on the nobility than on the 
vice. Here in America we have come to consider 
life as a great game in which it is decent, of 
course, to observe the rules, but the object of 
which, after all, is to win. There is some good 
reading on this topic in this book. The author 
acknowledges the value of the game in main- 
taining morale, but confesses that the English 
sense of the game and ours give us a relish and a 
safety valve, so to speak, that makes for clean- 
ness and health. But he adds, "The tendency to 

189 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

surrender too much to group-loyalty, and to 
idolize victory and aggressiveness generally, is 
always present and often overshadowing. People 
'determined to win' are hardly more wholesome 
than people unable to win, because in winning 
they usually lose more than they gain." The 
temptation to quote Mr. Yeomans in his perti- 
nent and telling phrases is overpowering. His 
idiomatic sentences need no explication and can- 
not be paraphrased with any saving of words. 
With a world of wonder and romance about us, 
with nature in a thousand silent voices calling on 
us for a closer acquaintance, it seems shocking 
that man must herd under awnings and pro- 
menade on asphalt. Mr. Yeomans is a devotee 
of the out-door life, esteeming the naturalist the 
happiest of men. In two capital anecdotes 
which have the marks of actual experience upon 
them he tells of the paltry little schoolmarm who 
"taught geography, the geography of informa- 
tion," at a thousand a year, but knew not the 
alphabet of "the geography of inspiration." 
The other story is of an astronomer who startled 
his superintendent as well as a book agent by 
asking for a telescope with which to show the 
children the stars; not diagrams and ingenious 
textbooks, written for two bad purposes — to sell 
new, but to teach at second hand. 

190 



A BREATH OF FRESH AIR ON EDUCATION 

With so much that is good, it is difficult to 
pick and choose. Instances of Mr. Yeomans' 
fehcity of phrase are these. Society's only ap- 
plause for a man, he tells us, is "when he is seen 
running, like a tired dog, under a vehicle called a 
career." Or his remark concerning a "rather 
metallic" teacher of English, "just juggling Eng- 
lish words. " In that classroom " nothing alive is 
ever exposed. " And he adds : "If you have not 
a lion concealed about your person, dear teacher, 
haven't you at least a rabbit.?" An eloquent 
passage on this maligned and beautiful world of 
ours ends: "Steamers and trains poke painfully 
along like insects in high grass. In little spots, 
illumined by electricity and smudged with smoke 
there is a rather repulsive swarming of otherwise 
invisible human beings." 

Among the many independent ideas which 
make up the all too brief pages of this book there 
seems to me none so suggestive as the chapter 
entitled " Cross-fertilization. " Taking the ways 
of plant life in this regard, Mr. Yeomans asks 
why men may not profit by the example of 
nature. Shut up each class within itself, we 
tend to the perpetuation of our own limitations 
within our own species. The upper class estab- 
lished in its family, its social group, knows only 
its like. With children before sophistication's 
winged feet overtake them, there is no such 

191 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

barrier as a little more wealth or a grade more 
luxury. And so between the middle and the 
lower classes. In fine scorn Mr. Yeomans tells of 
an old man who could conceive in his mind and 
build to completion a schooner, trim and cap- 
able, a thing of beauty, a mastery of the elements. 
And such a man is patronized as a laboring man 
by bank clerks and salesmen! It is one of the 
advantages of a sojourn in the country — the real 
country, not toy-shop suburbs — that you can 
meet there on terms of equality the man who 
toils with his hands and lives with nature. It is 
a beautiful thought, this of human cross-fer- 
tilization; the most ideal, the most liberal, the 
most democratic which I have come across for 
many a day. 



PROFESSOR SANTAYANA ON 
AMERICAN OPINION 

1"^HIS book was originally addressed, we are 
informed, to British audiences in the form 
of lectures. But the subject, American life in 
its academic and intellectual phases, especially 
at Harvard, is even more immediately interesting 
to us who are of American birth. Professor San- 
tayana possesses two advantages for his task, 
unusual in their combination, and these are his 
foreign blood and secondly his American aca- 
demic associations. Born a Spaniard, Mr. 
Santayana was educated at Harvard and pro- 
fessed philosophy there for more than twenty 
years. Wherefore he is able alike to know, to 
sympathize, even at times to admire, and yet to 
view American, or at least New England char- 
acter and philosophical opinion, from the van- 
tage of a detached observer. In his preface he 
very aptly observes that such a work can hardly 
claim for itself truth because it enables us "to 
see ourselves as others see us, " for in such cases it 
Is the observer often who is better disclosed than 
the thing seen. And yet it is always an approxi- 
mation at least to a better understanding of the 
realities to have them honestly and dispassion- 
ately discussed by one who combines a know- 
ledge of the subject with a clear perception of its 

193 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

relations and the radical detachment of essen- 
tially alien blood. 

To the sanguine American spirit which is so 
passionately attached to the faith that rapid and 
continuous betterment is one of the certainties of 
human development, it will come as something 
of a shock to hear that "civilization is perhaps 
approaching one of those long winters that over- 
take it from time to time. A flood of barbarism 
from below may soon level all the fair works of 
our Christian ancestors, as another flood two 
thousand years ago leveled those of the an- 
cients." And yet Mr. Santayana is far from 
hopeless as to the future; on the contrary he is 
full of illumination and recognition for the essen- 
tial idealism of American character. While I 
doubt not that to the seasoned philosophic mind 
the gist of this book will be found in the fine 
chapters of analysis of the philosophies of the 
two notable Harvard philosophers, with both 
of whom the author was intimately associated, to 
the general reader and the journeyman reviewer 
it is the prospects, so to speak, by the way which 
allure. What could be a finer tribute to liberality, 
for example, than this on William James .^ 
"Nobody ever recognized more heartily the 
chance that others had of being right, and the 
right they had of being different." Or what 
shrewder observation could we have than this on 

194 



SANTA YANA ON AMERICAN OPINION 

the associations of Josiah Royce with certain 
good folks whom we know are addicted to ad- 
vanced thinking? "On current affairs his judg- 
ments were highly seasoned and laboriously 
wise * * * His reward was that he became a 
prophet to a whole class of earnest troubled 
people, who, having discarded doctrinal religion, 
wished to think their life worth living, when, to 
look at what it contained, it might not have 
seemed so." Mr. Santayana is often thus keen 
on the subconscious relations of the bed rock of 
the Puritan spirit to the discard of its forms. 
Wider in its reach is the observation that "hardly 
anybody, except the Greeks at their best, has 
realized the sweetness and glory of being a ra- 
tional animal," and the recognition that out of 
the Hebraic idea of themselves as God's chosen 
people has arisen "that terrible interest in ma- 
terial existence, " in material splendor which still 
haunts much of our Christian thinking as to the 
world to come. However, the author admits that 
"some detachment from existence and from the 
hopes of material splendor has indeed filtered 
into Christianity through Platonism. " 

Perhaps the reader does not feel out of his 
depth, or will not confess it. His reviewer is 
sputtering. Let us get back to the shore. In 
his chapter on academic environment, Mr. 
Santayana sets forth the difhculties of a philos- 

195 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

opher — he might have added of any investi- 
gating scholar — in combining pure speculation 
with that "delightful paternal art," teaching. 
And he likens the latter to acting "where the 
performance often rehearsed, must be adapted 
to an audience hearing it only once. " There is a 
further difficulty for the teacher, a further re- 
sponsibility to his students, "he must neither 
bore, nor perplex nor demoralize them. " It is a 
just observation that "while the sentiments of 
most Americans in politics and morals, if a little 
vague, are very constructive, the democratic 
instincts have produced a system of education 
which anticipates all that the most extreme re- 
volution could bring about. " The author finds 
in the preponderance of women among teachers 
of the young, in ambitious, easy and optional 
lessons, "divided between what the child likes 
now and what he is going to need in his trade or 
profession" the ever-increasing gulf between the 
intellectual and the practical life. Wherefore "a 
gentle contempt" on the part of the young 
American for the past and a kindly regret for the 
poor old fellows who had no chance to live in our 
incomparable age. Wherefore, likewise, Amer- 
ican intelligence is largely absorbed in what is not 
intellectual, father finding his recourse in busi- 
ness, the women and children in various forms of 
frivolity and play. It is in this cleavage that our 

196 



SANTAYANA ON AMERICAN OPINION 

want of any real society really lies; for such 
society as we have is distinctly unintellectual 
and frivolous, while our intellectuality in its asso- 
ciations remains quasi-professional and unsocial. 
To return to education, Mr. Santayana aptly 
remarks that anything might have been taught 
in the liberal curriculum of the Harvard of his 
day. "You might almost be an atheist, if you 
were troubled enough about it. " Still, a certain 
sense of duty. and decorum reigned over all and, 
he wittily concludes, "a slight smell of brimstone 
lingered in the air." 

Mr. Santayana's last chapter is entitled 
"English Liberty in America," and in it he pays 
a fine tribute to the "eminence in temper, good 
will, reliability, accommodation" in which alone 
can we hope for the development of a real de- 
mocracy. To dominate the world by co-oper- 
ation is better than to dominate it by conquest; 
experiment in government is safer and likely to 
prove in the end more efficient than government 
by inspiration. "Free government," the author 
tells us elsewhere, "works well in proportion as 
government is superfluous." "In America there 
is but one way of being saved, though it is not 
peculiar to any of the official religions which 
themselves must silentl}^ conform to the national 
orthodoxy or else themselves become impotent 
and merely ornamental. This national faith 

197 



APPRAISEMENTS AND ASPERITIES 

and morality are vague in- idea, but inexorable in 
spirit; they are the gospel of work and the belief 
in progress. * * * American life is free as a 
whole, because it is mobile * * * In temper 
America is docile and not at all tyrannical; it has 
not predetermined its career, and its merciless 
momentum is a passive resultant." "Certainly 
absolute freedom," he concludes, "would be 
more beautiful if we were birds or poets; but 
co-operation and a loving sacrifice of a part of 
ourselves — or even of the whole save the love in 
us — are beautiful, too, if we are men living to- 
gether. " I make no apology for quoting thus 
frequently from this suggestive, this sound and 
sweet-tempered book. Where thought it so com- 
pletely and yet unsuperfluously clothed in the 
raiment of apt words there is no other way. Mr. 
Santayana's style is as attractive as his ideas are 
stimulating and allaying. 



LIST OF BOOKS REVIEWED 

E. V. Lucas, "Adventures and Enthusiasms." 

Mrs. R. Clipston Sturgis, "Personal Prejudices." 

Agnes Repplier, "Points of Friction." 

Winifred Kirkland, "The View Vertical." 

Samuel McChord Crothers, "The Dame School of 

Experience." 
Douglas Goldring, " Reputations, Essays in Criticism. " 
Edwin W. Morse, "Life and Letters of Hamilton W. 

Mabie." 
William Roscoe Thayer, "The Art of Biography." 
Rose Macaulay, "Potterism." 
Joseph Conrad, "Notes on Life and Letters." 
E. W. Howe, "The Anthology of Another Town." 
Carl Sandburg, "Smoke and Steel," 
Alfred Noyes, "Collected Poems," Volume HI. 
John Masefield, "Right Royal," 

"Enslaved and Other Poems." 
Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Lancelot, a Poem." 
George E.Woodberry, "The Roamer and Other Poems." 
George P. Baker, "Modern American Plays." 
John Drinkwater, "Mary Stuart, a Play." 
Gilda Veresi, "Enter Madame, a Comedy." 
Odin Gregory, "Caius Gracchus." 
Sacha Guitry, "Deburau, a Comedy, translated by 

Grenville Parker." 
RoMAiN RoLLAND, "LiluH, a Farce." 
Michael Strange, "Clair de Lune, a Play." 

199 



LIST OF BOOKS REVIEWED 

Eugene O'Neill, "The Emperor Jones." 

George C. D. Odell, "Shakespeare from Betterton to 

Irving." 
Paul Elmer More, "A New England Group and Others." 
Robert Lynd, "The Art of Letters." 
Henry James, "Master Eustace." 

Mary Austen-Leigh, " Personal Aspects of Jane Austen. " 
John Tyler, "The New Stone Age in Northern Europe." 
Edward Yeomans, "Shackled Youth." 
George Santa yana, "Character and Opinion in the 

United States." 



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